In the middle of the night last week, Torchwood Archives, LMeve Database, Yearly Stats and Aideron Technologies instance of LMeve vanished from the internet.
But it wasn’t a DDOS attack.
It turns out hypervisors (such as VMware) sometimes crash, just like Windows does.
There was connection to neither the Linux system that powers my websites, nor to the VMware running under the hood. So at first it all looked like a good old fashioned hardware fault. It took a good while to restore, because my server is colocated in a different city, and due to real life I couldn’t just go there and investigate it locally.
Here’s where a remote KVM comes in handy. It’s a special device that acts as keyboard, mouse and monitor, but you can access it remotely by visiting a special web page.
KVM which was connected to my server died a week earlier and was sent to RMA…
With connectivity to Linux and VMware gone, and KVM unavailable, the only way was to have a look locally, by connecting keyboard and monitor directly to the server.
What did the datacenter techie see on my box? Bluescreen I hear you say. Close. But on VMware bluescreens are… Pink. So there was a Pinkscreen waiting there. A simple power restart was enough to restore all the services back online.
P.S. My coleague from work says VMware Pinkscreens are not PINK, they are PURPLE.