Yesterday several of my web servers experienced a significant network outage when the switch they’re connected to had a full blade go offline—permanently offline, that is.

Although the servers remained up and running, they couldn’t be reached until the network problem was resolved.  That didn’t take long.

However, the loss of network connectivity had another impact I had not foreseen and didn’t realize until this morning.

Because the database servers are utilized via the network, loss of connectivity at the right time caused some automatic maintenance functions to fail, and that in turn truncated some of the SQL tables.  Luckily, they were only the statistics tables which were bloated and unused, so I dropped them, ran maintenance on the rest of the tables, and am now checking functionality and data integrity.

All that said, you might have seen some bizarre things here in the last day.  I apologize for that as I was gone all day yesterday, toyed with it last night and thought I had fixed it, then got an e-mail from mArniAc this morning letting me know of a problem I hadn’t seen.  Hopefully everything is now back to normal and working properly.