# sys admins wake up please :)



## copypaste (Dec 4, 2013)

Hi,

I'm not a very technical person, but sort of stuck here. I've got a question and would really appreciate if someone can dedicate a minute to express their thoughts with regard to the following.

Here is a situation: my website runs on a vServer (hetzner.de) - with useless support. Anyway, they did maintenance on the server and as a result they switched it off and made some fixings. Now the server is back and running again. All the services are also running but the website is not back. They didn't touch the DNS but surely screwed the server along with the website. I ping the server, IP, and domain name - in all the cases the ping goes through successfully, but the problem is that I cannot connect to the server. The FTP and SSH are just simply timing out. I wrote them asking if they put a firewall and they said no. From their website I got access to a Remote Konsole where I can see that all the services are up, but there is absolutely no access from anywhere on the planet. And their remote Konsole has got mixed keyboard letters so you may look for a 'forward slash' and die trying because it may appear under the = key. it runs on the browser with a Java plugin. With limited commands I see that lighttpd, MySQL, etc. all are up and running.

So my question is: Is there anything I can try to bring the website back to life so the FTP and SSH work and most importantly the website itself? What causes the problem? What shall I check? What shall I do? Please bear in mind that I have got very limited availability to input characters such us dash (-). I've tried the whole keyboard buttons but couldn't find it.

The FBSD FreeBSD ver version is 8.3.


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## von_Gaden (Dec 5, 2013)

If you are not a "very technical person" probably you should find one  But using SSH is not frequent for "web designing persons" either  You should check the following ON THE SERVER:

Status of network interfaces and IPs - after the maintenance some interfaces may have other names. Can you ping the default gateway? Can you ping/trace/SSH or at least telnet on port 80 any other host? These should show whether your server is really connected to the Internet or not. As an old sysadmin I can't hide my curiosity about your results.


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## copypaste (Dec 5, 2013)

von_Gaden said:
			
		

> If you are not "very technical person" probably you should find one ;-) But using SSH is not frequent for "web designing persons" either  You should check the following ON THE SERVER:
> Status of network interfaces and IPs - after the maintenance some interfaces may have other names. Can you ping the default gateway? Can you ping/trace/ssh or at least telnet on port 80 any other host? These should show is your server really connected to the Internet or not. As an old sysadmin I can't hide my curiosity about your results...



Thank you very much for the reply - I telnet to port 80 and it goes through, also port 443 is also open coz because there is SSL standing. I wrote the support and they told me that there is no firewall whereas, in fact there was. I shut it down and everything started to work. It seems stupid, I know, but at least now I've got access to the server via SSH and FTP. I'm saying that the server can now be reconfigured without using their stupid limited console.

Thanks again for your time! I do appreciate!


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## von_Gaden (Dec 5, 2013)

I'm glad everything went fine. It's strange to filter SSH by firewall but hostings are sometimes strange aren't they? And - don't you think FreeBSD 8.3 is a kind of legacy already? Yes, it's still supported but we are awaiting 10.0! Once I built a server for customers with FreeBSD 4.2 - installed in 2002. Surprisingly they used it till 2010 when I reinstalled it with FreeBSD 8.0 as I barely remember. Yes, it worked and people are still happy but as it's said: "Don't try this at home."


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