My 3rd of July, or how I nearly got pwned

Well, now that it’s over, I can finally talk about it.

I got up Sunday morning, July 3rd, salivating over all the cholesterol-laden meats I was gonna burn…er…grill that day in celebration of the holiday. I was looking forward to my weekend breakfast of imported Nestle 2-in-1 coffee sachets (I prefer the Indonesian version) and peanut butter crackers (cheese-flavor orange crackers only).

But noooo…it wasn’t to be. An email alerted me to the fact that our corporate website, vuuch.com, was dead dead dead.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just reboot our EC2 instance and deal with it Tuesday.

No joy.

Panic sets in. The cracker crumbs mix with coffee drool and run down the side of my face. There’s no freakin’ website no matter how many times I restart the instance. It boots, it dies. It boots again, it dies harder.

“Calm down,” the inner voice says. “You’ll think of something.”

“Up yours, you optimistic fool. The damn thing is in rigor mortis. Start searching for the last database backup ’cause, baby, you are spending the day cooking up a new server, not burgers.”

“Just finish breakfast. Start defrosting the dogs. You’ll…wait a minute. What if…”

None of you really expect me to tell you exactly how I recovered the site do you? After all, if another bozo tries the same thing, I need something to give me an edge, don’t I?

Besides, the real purpose of writing this post is to try out the spankin’ new WordPress 3.2 before I upgrade all my other sites.

As the old saying goes, you can pwn some of the people some of the time, but you can’t help but love WordPress 3.2.