Back in the Saddle

July 27, 2008 | Filed Under Computers, Uncategorized, Work | No Comments

If you were trying to get to HBI in the last few days, you may have seen some “site not available” messages. Correction, you may have seen A LOT of “site not available” messages.

At least twice on Friday, the server went down, and I had my ISP reboot it.  I couldn’t take much time to deal with it because my REAL job – the one that pays the bills – had me stuck in “networking hell” – and I don’t mean the kind where you talk to people.

[Geek alert] Friday morning I had scheduled to move a handful of servers from one subnet to another in preparation for a larger network move. I had scripted out what needed to be done the night before.  What SHOULD have been a 1 hour move turned into an all day ordeal complete with rebooting the firewall AND rebooting the DNS servers.  These things seldom go as planned, and this one took a wrong turn at Albuquerque right out of the starting gate.  In the midst of it all I had meetings to attend and other fires to put out.  So HBI languished.

Late Friday night the HBI server died again and no amount of incantations, three-fingered salutes or prayers would get it back. Thank god my ISP is small, with actual staff there to help you on a Saturday.

Saturday was a bit of a frantic day for me, what with 25+ people arriving that night for the annual Natalie VS Tony Rib Cook-off…  but I just had to get out to my ISP and see if there was anything that could be done for my decrepit and presently defunct server.

Corey was a sweetheart – he pulled it off the shelf, we tried swapping a video card, but that didn’t work, but I did notice that while the box had power, the fan on the power supply wasn’t spinning. He rummaged through a box of power supplies, uncertain if they were good or not – and after the second one we tried, we hit success – the box was up and running again.

Of course, this just highlights the fact that I simply HAVE to get my ass in gear and work on the migration of HBI to a newer/better/stronger server.  However, to get that done, I think I’ll actually have to take a week of vacation leave and focus on nothing else.  If things ever slow down at work, I may do just that.  Granted, I’d rather spend a week of vacation leave on a sunny beach somewhere, with a buff young pool-boy named Juan bringing me drinks, but this shit has just got to get DONE, and it’s too involved and complicated to do piecemeal.  The biggest pain in the ass is going to be going from a non-case sensitive system to a case-sensitive one.  I have THOUSANDS of documents to go through and sanitize by both changing file names and globally searching and replacing links in files.  Then there is the database upgrade, a dozen applications to test (and a few to upgrade – like the HBI discussion forums), and the mail server aliases to port over…. AUGH. It gives me a headache just thinking about it. 

I started in on this HBI migration last summer. Truly I did.  Admittedly at the urging/prodding of the bf, who even went so far as to get the dev system all set up and ready for me in an effort to get me MOVING on it.   But once again it languished due to other more pressing priorities, and perhaps my own penchant for procrastination on these kinds of endeavors.  I’m great about doing this kind of stuff for work, but personally, I LOATHE having to reinstall and move all my stuff to a new computer.  Maybe it’s because it’s what I do all day, that it’s the last thing I want to do when I get home at night?  This would explain why I am still using Windows 2000 server on my home system.

But I realize that I simply MUST make some time to get HBI ported to a new, improved, more reliable server.  Hardware is cheap enough now, and the current server is likely on its last legs, so it’s TIME.  Now if I could just find some.

Oh, and if the site goes AWOL again this week, it’s because we have to change IP Addresses and it may take a while for your local servers to update their DNS.  Fear not, I am still here, stirring up shit.