Why Allpar was down

Some people may have noticed that Allpar was very slow yesterday before disappearing entirely.

We installed a very nice WordPress plugin, which worked very well, except that one particular setting caused an infinite loop. When the plugin was first installed, there was no problem; it appeared rather suddenly. It took a long time to isolate the problem.

While I was working on it, I tried shutting down Apache. That worked except that a rogue httpd process remained alive and could not be force-killed. The server had to be rebooted, and that showed a problem with the BIOS having the wrong boot order.

Then it took a while before I figured out the plugin problem.

The writer of the plugin is skilled and very helpful and has fixed it for other people… so I’m not blaming him. If anything, I should have figured out the issue far sooner.

We’re back now!