A couple of weeks ago, I was proper ill with flu; the problem with looking after your own server is that only you can fix it - it’s well and good having monitoring systems (nagios) telling you about faults, but if you can’t read or see the alerts the fault won’t get resolved.

During this time I was ill, for an unknown reason the mySQL process on my server died, as such my website (and others I look after) were down for 8 hours. The fix was simple, one command, restart the service and normal service was resumed (excuse the pun).