The Receptacle is a collective group of people who want reliable and stable hosting for their personal web sites, email and any other little net-related projects they may want to play with at any given time. Each member pays a share in the costs of keeping a server running and connected and has access to whatever resouces they require. We use a "business" class plan for our server, so we don't have to worry about sudden port blocking or other restrictions that might be arbitrarily placed on us if we were using a residential service. We also get to bitch like hell if something breaks.
Last week, the server was down for a little over 24 hours. It's our first major outage for quite some time, but still - it was annoying. I finally got things back online at about 9pm Friday night, and we seem to be stable now. A list of the changes is below, plus details on the circumstances leading up to the problem.