Blog of the FML

For the past thirty days or so I have experienced hosting hell on every website I touch. I am beginning to wonder if I have the technological equivalent of a a black hole aura when it comes to web junk. It started at school with our server then moved to the Colonialtown hosting (minor), The Sentinel blog (not my fault but still maybe karmic) and then my handy collection of sites (black out baby). Like clockwork and on a weekly basis disaster struck. Let me give you a few details.

School

Just two days before a scheduled change over to a new, updated, faster, niftier server the ancient machine holding the school’s site went belly up. It had perfect timing. Dead within minutes of the bell ringing for the first class of the day the computer teachers, who all host classes pages on the server, lit up the phone. Dammit. Drive not recognized. Open the case and what do I hear, the HD clicks of death. No problemo, we have backups. A handy NAS has been pulling backups. I make a call to the Server Guru for the county. Help! [I needed help because of my failed attempt earlier in the month. Damned Frontpage extensions, I hate them. Touchy little bastards and I want to dump them.] Server Guru says he can come tomorrow. Okay. In the mean time we tried freezing the drive. (didn’t work)

Well, Guru arrives and we begin. Start with checking the condition of the backups. No backups. %$%&%%^$%^&*&^^&*$@##$%@@^&!!!!! Yes, no backups. Software had gone screwy and was actually lying to us. It was telling us that there was a backup, that it was 14.2 GB big. But it was a big empty balloon. %^^%$&^%%^&#%&^T^&*!!!! While Guru set up the new server I fretted. And discussed the rather pricey option of data recovery. Being a school means no moola. We lump it. Start from scratch. This was after I worked on a redesign and sort of pushed it. I finally won them over and it was looking good.

Then I have a epiphany. I remember some random item on Digg about a drive recovery store confessionals. That the majority of drives gone bad it was just the controller card. I run this by Guru. He says go for it. After sacrificing three more drives for their canabalized cards it boots up. With lightening speed we pull the site, republish and bam, website back up and on new server. Whoopee!

Colonialtown

Let me just say that we had to stick with overpriced because it was local. But we were a little late. None the less, service was cut four days before the final deadline. I even paid the night before but they didn’t check. Had to reset everything, no telling what still doesn’t work. Not happy about it but it mostly works now. Revisit next year.

Sentinel Blog

Typepad hiccuped. I watched the thread about the issue happening to the others. No problem on my end. I could still publish. Figured it was the joy of Ecto, that it had to be a web interface issue. Then after a week of no new post and three queued up, it happened to me. Of course I find it after every one has gone to bed. Takes a few days to fix and posts not worth posting, not timely any more. I had some good ones though. I must say this was the most pleasant of the four. They even made sure the one post to get to the server was posted properly.

I thought I would catch up though…

FML Blogs

Then Blog of the FML and Orlando Pumpers throw up all over themselves. A bazillion wordpress errors (trust me, I was keeping a tally). I had been hosting at Extendmac. Recently Brian Amerige began to focus on his upcoming app, Flow. He moved his stuff to MediaTemple and ceased hosting. He was nice enough to let any one with time left to sit it out but no renewals. I knew this but was procrastinating. I new that the errors were due to servers crunches on space and just need a little tweaky with phpMyAdmin. So that night I started my search for new hosting. I couldn’t afford Media Temple and didn’t need that much power any way (nobody reads this crap). Dreamhost had some complaints from what I could gather so I ended up with Lunarpages. With cPanel and a price of just $10 more for a year (coupons) plus the ability to host four more domains it was a winner.

Then it all went dark. With new server info in hand and Transmit fired up, Extendmac was down. Blank and nowhere to be seen. Crap. Only emails I had were with the Extendmac domain. I fired some off, no returns so I wait till the next day. Write some more to other addresses found in google cached sites. Nothing. Dammit. Then I try the flow.com address. Presto response. He was looking into it. Okay. Took another day or so but it was back up. [I must say Brian was cool about helping and I wish him luck on Flow, it does look really interesting and will be going for a beat when its public.]

Now for the moving. Never done it. Made lots of stupid errors. Need to fix DB before moving it. Upgrade WP, then add themes and plugins. Too may index files because I am not watching. Reset admin passwords and write them down so I don’t forget in three minutes. I stayed away from it all over the weekend for a break but spent six hours last night and got everything back up and running, I think.

Over all I learned a lot and can say some of it was fun but I don’t want to do this again. Sucks, I had a few subscribers but they seem to have dropped pretty quick. Can’t blame them. It was like I disappeared. Also, this last one happened over my birthday weekend. That stunk a little.

Things are up and running and I have some truly nifty things in the pipeline. Stayed tuned.

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