We had a blizzard on Tuesday in Denver. Apr 24 and we got nearly a foot of snow out at the ranch.

We also lost power, which was a rude awakening. We had full laptop

batteries, but no connectivity. I was taking kids to school and by the

time I got back to work, the UPS's had run out of power, so I was

stuck. I had time to grab a couple documents off my desktop before it

died. Luckily my wife uses Cisco VPNs and has an air card from Sprint,

so she can connect anywhere. I got the newsletter loaded and sent from

her machine before we shut down. We couldn't charge the laptops, so we

tried to use them as little as possible.

Why not go to Starbucks? We were snowed in. Literally. The kids bus

made it to their stop and that was it. It got stuck there and was still

there when I dug out with the tractor at 10 this morning.

So I got to Borders and worked a little, but had a scare. One of the

newsletter processes is web based and it was failing.  So I hit

the source file, edited it, and tried again. Still failed. I tried

renaming a file, but it wasn't found. So I went to the backup web

server thinking something had changed and tried there. Still it gave me

errors.

Finally I realized that perhaps I had a DNS issue. I pinged the server

and realized, by IP, that I was hitting the Denver server, not the UK

one. I was about to start complaining to ZoneEdit, thinking they

reloaded our zone from a backup for some reason, and then decided to

check my hosts file. Sure enough I was pointing to the Denver server in

there. I deleted that, restarted the browser and things were good.

Just an FYI, be very careful of using entries in the hosts file. If you

wonder where it is, it's: /%system root%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts