úlfurinn

Suppose you’re running an Erlang application (ejabberd, for instance). It’s been up for months and months but then you try to use a remote control script (like ejabberdctl) and it fails, probably saying things like “nodedown”, indicating it cannot communicate with the Erlang node; yet the application itself is apparently running just fine. Running out of ideas, you run epmd -names and, to your horror, it shows an empty list.