The Parliament Of Australia‘s website went down yesterday, and it stayed fully down for 36 hours.
According to The brisbane times their solution was typical, just reboot everything:
“It took a little while to track that down and then we had to go through an elaborate rebooting process to actually fully reconnect it to the external world.”
Thompson said the department’s IT staff still “haven’t got to the bottom” of why people outside the Parliament building could not access the site following the upgrade.
The reason why you still “haven’t got to the bottom” of the problem (and I suspect never will), is because you went on an “elaborate rebooting process”. If something goes wrong, you don’t just reboot everything in sight until it works again. You figure out what the problem is first.
But for a site that looks like it’s still running on ASP, has a recommended viewing size of 800×600, and is running LISP over the web (I shudder), and expects semicolons to be treated like the ubiquitous question mark in URLs, where the error page returns a 404, I think they might have bigger problems.