Okay, guys.

If you were working in the lab on monday the 15th, somewhere around 5 or 6PM, then you noticed at somepoint that everything related to edwards.sdsu.edu stopped working. That’s the SEED, all the websites, everything.

Yeah, that was my fault. I’m sorry!

Rob has had me working on getting DHCP working on the new server, such that we feed internet in through one ethernet port (eth0), and it subdivides it out to all the OTHER servers, which are connected on another ethernet card (eth1). Ubuntu does NOT provide good documentation for dhcp. If you know about servers or about DHCP to begin with, it’s all you need. But I’m going to admit, I knew nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. So I followed their advice to the letter, and managed to do everything wrong.

Summary: I defined eth0 as our router, on a fixed IP. (Please remember that we’re currently feeding internet IN and OUT through that.) I also defined a wireless network with two sub domains inside of it, one pointing to eth1, and the other pointing to nothing. (An important thing to note, we don’t even HAVE a wireless card.)

So I logged in monday remotely, I wasn’t able to make it to campus, it was the only day all week I wasn’t going to be in the lab, and was like, “I am confident this will work! *Networking Restart*” Shortly after, the server disappeared from the world as we know it because I had just told it to stop using eth0 for internet. Panic ensued, Rob had to stop everything he was doing to go clean up my mess because I wasn’t even on campus, and I felt terrible. But I had kept the original configuration files for EVERY file I edited, and disaster was averted via those.

So now it is Tuesday. I’m in the lab, and I have started from step zero to configure dhcp. If you take all the information Ubuntu gives you and take it out of context, only apply it to eth1 with a bit of intuitive logic, you get our current situation: which is that DHCP works! I have posted detailed information on the labwiki.

This blog post is here to admit my mistakes, and impart a very important lesson to anyone who reads this: For the love of god, always save the originals of any file you edit, and NEVER change server configuration files if you are not next to the server.

The end.