First, I sincerely hope the upcoming upgrades replace whatever part of pliny is defective and has caused crashes regularly ever since we've had the machine. (Unless it's software. Who knows?)
Second, a note: the wiki is designed to fall back onto cached pages if the database server isn't available. *But*, often it ends up spending an inordinate amount of time trying to talk to a server that isn't there, and doesn't give up like it should.
A manual workaround is to go into LocalSettings (rather, CommonSettings) and change the server IP from the real one to localhost. It'll talk to the local server, find no database by that name, and crap out immediately.
A clean, automated way to mark the server as Dead Dead Dead would probably be good.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)