Oh, internet. You do not even want to know what my day was like. But, apparently, I'm going to tell you.
A) Day 3 of migraine.
B) Also, stiff neck.
C) DNS was totally effed up in. In completely different ways from last week.
D) We kind of lost a spacecraft. A little. Just the orientation part of it. Was this related to the DNS problem? Why, yes. Yes it was. (I hear the spacecraft is going to be fine, though.)
DNS, in case you aren't a giant nerd, is the thing that takes the name of a computer (say, www.cnn.com) and turns it into a number (157.166.255.18) because computers like numbers. If you give them a name with no number attached, they just flip you the bird. The names are only for the convenience of us human beings, who like words. If DNS gets broken, we keep putting in www.cnn.com, and our computer keeps telling us "WTF!" or more technically "server not found". Either way you're not getting to your website. But if DNS is working, you can put in www.cnn.com, or any other website, and your computer translates it into a number and then goes on its jolly way finding the machine somewhere in the world that matches up with that number. It's a miracle, really.
Why was DNS effed up? Well, that's a complicated question. I know a lot of the answer, but I'm pretty certain you don't want to know. The real reason is that we chose to use the friendly, non-mission DNS, which lets us get to youtube. Non-mission DNS doesn't block any websites. But it also doesn't have delightful 24x7 support, or any kind of service level agreement. This was a lot less real to my boss until today.
So, I spent today on the phone. Because there was not so very much I could do about it other than harass technical people in other places. Can you guess how much I like spending the day on the phone with people who all insist that the problem lies elsewhere?
Anyway, that was today. I'm hoping for no more migraine tomorrow. And no rain. And no DNS problems. And only minor dentistry.
The problem is ALWAYS somewhere else.
ReplyDeleteTrue! I gotta say though, even though people were saying that, they still kept looking. Which is how the problem got fixed. One of those fellows kept digging. ALL DAY. Until he finally found a problem on his end. It was actually a biggish problem (part of a cluster fell down) and I assume it would have come to his attention in some other way eventually. I was impressed with his tenacity on our behalf.
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