An old lady calls the power company, and tells them that the power is out. The tech on the other end says “The power is on here. It must be your fault.”

I’m experiencing some very severe technical problems with my site. Please bear with me.

The site was down most of yesterday. WordPress was having trouble accessing my database server. I could access the database from remote administration tools, as well as through the control panel from my host. My site could access the database some of the time, but not reliably and not consistantly.

One of the technical support personnel, “Doug,” was convinced that the problem lay in my code. However, if the problem was with my connection strings, why would it connect even some of the time? Shouldn’t it not connect at all. Doug was very assanine; I think I was inturrupting his afternoon break and he was a bit put off.

The second tech I spoke with, whose name I don’t remember, was convinced I had used up my 20 available database connections. He said that the problem lay with my pconnect commands. 1) PHP’s pconnect is designed to reuse opened connections, so if that was the case, then WordPress should have been able to reuse one of those existing connections. 2) WordPress is the only code on my site right now, and it doesn’t use pconnect. Again, another case of “it’s your code.” Furthermore, genious tech #2, when he was trying to drop the non-existant connections to the database, instead dropped the database. Everything was gone.

The third tech I spoke with, “Dennis,” was actually helpful. He did the extra work to restore my database from the previous night’s backup, so I only lost a day of data. He also put a Brinkster (my host) approved database test page on my site, and tried to access it. Lo-and-behold, he couldn’t access the database. Imagine that. And, since this was a Brinkster-approved page, he couldn’t blame the code. So, Dennis did a little research. It turns out that the routing tables for one of the web servers in the farm I am on had an incorrect IP address for the database server in question.

Huh. I guess it wasn’t my code. Not that I thought that it was, considering the site has worked fine for 8 months now on the present code, and the code hasn’t changed.

Update: Everything should be working now. The database was restored last night. The IP address issue has been resolved. I’ve corrected the header problem (caused by a space in one of the php files). Everything seems to be wworking correctly again.