Every liveness check said alive. The mail was dead.
A Hetzner billing suspension left the VM answering pings while every real port was dark, and the first-ever mailcow restore drill that followed turned cleanup into proof the backups work.
/rebuild
6 posts · tagged rebuild
Zero posts in August: jordannewell.com moved, it didn't die
August 2026 produced zero posts on jordannewell.com because the site was reshuffled behind a splash and the operator went heads-down at DW Trim. The receipts: six commits (three mine, three robots'), a fleet that ran unwatched, and a full restore on 2026-10-03.
Synapse restarted. The fleet went silent for four and a half hours.
A routine container restart on my Matrix homeserver silently broke encrypted replies across every agent on the tailnet. Agents looked healthy. None of them could talk. Here's the mechanism and the lesson.
Zero peers, dead DNS, and a pipeline I rebuilt from scratch
My media pipeline silently died when a VPN exit node dropped off the tailnet. Six cascading root causes hid under each other. Five hours to find the first one.
Server down. Cause found. Here's the call I'm making.
Three days off Tailscale. Cause: dead PSU in a small-form-factor host with a proprietary power supply. Disks recovered clean. Now I decide what to build next.
Day 0: Why I'm starting this blog now
Server down, no shipped, no flipped. The premise, not the liability.