Saturday, March 01, 2008

keeping smart and other things

Link-a-rama: SharpBrains has lots of resources about keeping your brain fit and trim and gunk-free: http://www.sharpbrains.com The top-ten neuroscience brainteasers is fun—you can even participate in an experiment. It’s going to take me a long time to get through all these wonderful links ... I’m frustrated because I still haven’t finished the last Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle. Most of it is done—maybe ten more clues to figure out before it’s done. So I figure my brain needs some sharpening as I can usually finish them. Eventually.

WEBSERVER WOES
Last Saturday, we got a phone call from one of our web hosting clients. She couldn’t get her email. I was zzzing away—it was still morning after all—so Stanley went down to the office to reboot the email server. At least, that’s what we assumed was the problem.

It wasn’t. He dragged me out of bed, telling me he needed help. We tried to reset the site, but couldn’t, then tried to reboot the server—nothing. It wouldn’t come back.  Trouble ticket in—we got our answer: disk drive was failing. Parts of it corrupted already.

The good news is that there were techs around over the weekend to take care of setting up a new webserver and transferring our sites over—I was kind of dreading having to wait until Monday. Our webserver provider, Netsonic, is a small company as far as companies like this go. That’s why we chose them—gee, it’s been more than five years ago now. So I was surprised that they sprang into action so fast. Even so, I knew it would take hours. It’s like getting a new computer—it takes a long time to prep the new one, transferring files and setting up programs and configuring stuff to work.

The disk, apparently, had been failing for a while—which explained all the reboots we needed to make, was driving us nuts. So the crash was actually a Good Thing. Despite the pain, we have the latest and greatest control panel software, the latest versions of PHP and mySQL, a bigger hard drive, a faster processor, and I guess the latest versions of apache and Linux (we have Fedora).

We did lose some of our database tables, but very few. I was able to salvage the templates for the updated version of our company website I’ve been working on (forever, it seems). Adam lost data for a school alumni site of his—I hope he can recover it. I had to fix some software that got buggy with mySQL 5, but it wasn’t that onerous once Bleau from Netsonic pointed me in the right direction. We still need root access and a link to our remote reboot (which I hope we never have to use) and to fine-tune our backups, oh and make sure we keep all the email servers out there happy by adding verification, but we’re happy.

I’m sure there are a few more things that have to be reset on our spiffy new box—they’ll shake out sooner or later. But the bulk of the pain is over.

Now I’m just scrambling to make up for the lost days.

posted by lee on 03/01/08 at 01:05 AM

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