Taluntain
Wed, 8th Sep '04, 9:44pm
Although the system upgrade took longer than I anticipated, with several annoying problems down the road, we got the new system up & running and are working on returning things back to normal. At the time of this posting, most of the things should be operational already. However, if you spot anything strange or problematic, please do let me know and I'll look into it.
As for details on why this upgrade and eventual normalization took so long... in short, not a single damn thing had gone according to my plans. Among other things, our server host messed up and set up our new hard drive with a year old system, which I, of course, promptly rejected. After that I had to wait some more for another hard drive with the proper system on. Once that was finally in place, the fun really started. The huge backup of the site I was getting from another location was downloading to the new server for about 8 hours, but then suddenly died at 82% and messed up the downloaded file so completely, I couldn't do anything with it. Luckily I also made a backup of all the site files prior to the system upgrade, so I started uploading the files myself. However, with my slow upload speed, this process took an even longer time to complete. After I finally uploaded the more important files, the real problems began.
More than half of the things didn't work, the front page news and message boards included. Eventually, with the invaluable help of Catbert and Blackthorne TA, we got everything back up and running properly, but it took another few hours. On top of it all, most of the problematic things started happening after midnight, so I was up till 3 or 4 am over the last couple of nights. Suffice it to say, this whole exercise ended up costing me (in more than one sense of the word) much more than I expected as well. But as it needed to be done, for several reasons, I really had no choice in the matter. I will be very happy once we finally return everything to the previous state and I can get some sleep, though.
As for details on why this upgrade and eventual normalization took so long... in short, not a single damn thing had gone according to my plans. Among other things, our server host messed up and set up our new hard drive with a year old system, which I, of course, promptly rejected. After that I had to wait some more for another hard drive with the proper system on. Once that was finally in place, the fun really started. The huge backup of the site I was getting from another location was downloading to the new server for about 8 hours, but then suddenly died at 82% and messed up the downloaded file so completely, I couldn't do anything with it. Luckily I also made a backup of all the site files prior to the system upgrade, so I started uploading the files myself. However, with my slow upload speed, this process took an even longer time to complete. After I finally uploaded the more important files, the real problems began.
More than half of the things didn't work, the front page news and message boards included. Eventually, with the invaluable help of Catbert and Blackthorne TA, we got everything back up and running properly, but it took another few hours. On top of it all, most of the problematic things started happening after midnight, so I was up till 3 or 4 am over the last couple of nights. Suffice it to say, this whole exercise ended up costing me (in more than one sense of the word) much more than I expected as well. But as it needed to be done, for several reasons, I really had no choice in the matter. I will be very happy once we finally return everything to the previous state and I can get some sleep, though.