If you tried to access this site between the hours of 3PM and 11:59PM EDT on Friday 29 October 2004, you may have noticed that you were not able to. The root cause of the problem was a power failure. When the UPS was exhausted, the server did a graceful shutdown. Unfortunately, the reboot when power was restored was not graceful.
A recent upgrade to modutils on the server was not sucessful, resulting in a massive failure when the server tried to boot. None of the required modules, including those for the ethernet adapters, were able to be loaded. After much consternation, a workaround was found, and modutils was able to be successfully updated. The server returned to normal operational status around midnight.
Thanks for your support :)