Some of you noticed that my site was down (500 internal server error) Friday and some of Saturday. I’m not exactly clear on how it happened, but PHP became broken on my VPS. I think the culprit was that the file /usr/lib/libcurl.so.3, which PHP was dynamically linking to, somehow seemed to disappear. It’s not clear to me whether I somehow did this accidentally (though I have not done much lately on the server) or if it happened through other means. Anyway, once DreamHost and I determined what was actually going on, DreamHost support reset the VPS and things came back to life.

Somehow this seemed to do something to another domain I have that uses Phusion Passenger for Python WSGI for Django — basically the Passenger stuff seemed to break and it was not launching Phusion Passenger WSGI’s request_handler.py. I had a few exchanges with DreamHost on this and then this morning suddenly it was working again. Not sure if DreamHost did something to fix it or if it was just the planets suddenly aligning.