When West Wing ended last night at 10, I was sleepy, and my usual chat distractors weren't around, so I went to be early.

Kind of amazing what an extra hour of sleep can do.

K.T. sent Matt a phone beep a few days ago. He got the e-mail, but not the actual phone beep.

That happens, every once in a while. Karen beeped me once, and it didn't actually show up on my phone until three days later. Crossed signals, or something.

Anyway, Matt was fretting about it, and he sent himself another beep, just to reassure himself that his phone wasn't broken or something.

It didn't work. The form processing, which usually re-displays the message for you, showed him an empty message.

How odd. I tried it. Same results. I tried sending to my phone instead. Same results.

A server glitch, perhaps? I went to telnet into the account, so I could play with the page and figure out what was wrong.

I got an extremely unhappy warning from the SSH program, instead. The RSA key had changed, and so had the IP address, both since the last time I'd connected. Was I positive someone wasn't attempting to spoof the server?

Well, no, I wasn't. I wrote Ashley - my friendly neighborhood sysadmin - and copied the message for him and asked him if the changes were legit. He wrote back within a couple of hours to tell me that yeah, everything was fine and legit, and I could tell the SSH program to just take the new address and key.

Then I had to try to remember my password. Oops. I don't telnet in to that account very often, and the FTP program I use to upload my journal entries remembers it for me. Maybe I should turn that off. It took me about five tries before I figured out the correct permutation of my usual set of password pieces.

Then I finally got down to debugging. After about an hour of making little changes, trying to beep myself again, and not getting very far, I finally came to the conclusion that Ashley had done an upgrade without telling me, and the upgrade had changed the way the form's variables were accessed.

But I couldn't figure out how to get the PHP manual to tell me what I needed to do differently. I wasn't sure where to look.

Finally, just as I was about to start tearing out hair, Jeremy logged in, and I asked him. He'd run into the same problem a few months ago, fortunately for me, and knew the answer. Once he told me what I needed to know, I just had to add about four lines to my script to make everything happy and shiny again.

So the phone mail thingy works again. But GAH, what an annoying couple of hours! (And yet... How oddly satisfying, to have finally fixed things.)

--Liz