Today was just a tremendous string of technical failures.

• I updated some WordPress modules, and things became unusable. It turns out the virtual machine was just about out of RAM, because I’d never upped the small limit I used for testing.
• I rebooted to do that, but it wouldn’t start. After at least an hour of debugging, I concluded that absolutely nothing had changed since the server’s virtual image last booted correctly. Restarting xend fixed it.
• When it finally came back up, networking wasn’t configured. It took me a while to find the appropriate routing information.
• When that was finally back up, the DNS server didn’t start. It doesn’t keep a log file, and it doesn’t print errors to the console. There were actually multiple problems that kept it from starting, and I’m not sure how they didn’t happen last time, to be honest.
• Burst.net, our hosting company, inexplicably started having about 1500ms pings for incoming traffic, tried from multiple sources across the country. This didn’t ‘break’ anything fully, though I expect that it didn’t bode well for NTP.

So things are up and running again… We hvae more RAM now, and a lot of little things have been updated. Keep your fingers crossed there aren’t more things that are broken.