If you tried to reach this server from midnight to around 9:30 this morning, it looks like you were out of luck, owing to a confluence of unhappy events.
This machine (and it’s predecessor) have had the same public IP address for about 3 years and as many network providers (@Home -> AT&T -> Comcast). For some reason, I was assigned a new address last night and the dhcp client software couldn’t or wouldn’t take it: it just kept the old one.
I tried removing power from the cable modem with no success. I ran the dhcpclient software by hand but nothing happened. I killed the existing dhclients process, and ran it again, the result being I was assigned an address of 0.0.0.0. Eventually, I used the Windows Workaround and rebooted: that resolved it.
But then, I learned the client software to the no-ip.org name service I have been using is unable to read the old style config files. Since I haven’t had the address expire in all this time, I never encountered this problem. So I had to dig around to find the right information to make a new config file. So www.paulbeard.org was working again.
An added wrinkle is that I am now using paulbeard.org as a domain as well, hoping to move to that, as time goes by. I use ZoneEdit to manage DNS since I don’t want to run it here on the wrong side of a flaky network link, and I had to update them with the new address . . . . .
bleacgh. It’s enough to make me migrate to TypePad . . . .