Relentless Self-Promotion -- Done RIGHT!
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On November 1 2005, I performed a comprehensive backup of the site to DVD. The site was offline for about 60 minutes while the backup was double-verified.
On November 2 2005, I upgraded the server’s OS from Fedora Core 3 to Fedora Core 4 and have fully patched the server.
I want to take an opportunity to point out a few things that you might not notice immediately when using this site. Click the title of this article (”Some Tips on Using This System“) to read the full article.
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Today, I performed a comprehensive backup of the system to the new DVD burner that I installed. It makes backing things up much nicer. I also installed another fan in the case to cool things off, replacing one that had locked up.
The site was unavailable for about 90 minutes during installation and the verification of the backup.
The database for this site was migrated from Xaraya to WordPress during the time of transition from one CMS to another.
Because I’d been using Xaraya for so long, the data was tightly integrated — things like callouts to pictures and links within articles to other articles were converted as they were — in Xaraya ‘format’.
I’ve completed an initial pass through the database to correct the most grevious of these errors — broken images, bad links, Xaraya-style calls. Doing such a pass takes a fair amount of time (this site features more than 600 posts, more than 300 links, and a ton of images) and I am certain that I missed some things.
Doing the database pass taught me a few new things about WordPress as well, so I am planning to do another, more lazy, pass through the database to find and eliminate any remaining issues from the data migration. If you notice anything that doesn’t work as you expect, please take the time to let me know so I can fix it!
After nearly three months of downtime, two replacement motherboards, countless emails to software authors & support folks, and hours & hours of time spent working to restore the system, this site is finally back up and running on the now-restored server hardware.
Nearly everything in this server is new — power supply, memory, motherboard, hard drive, and network card — so hopefully we can run without problems for a while. Additionally, the site’s storage has been boosted from 32 gigs to 40 gigs.
The site has been updated to latest versions of any software that has been updated since the crash as needed. The performance has been ‘tweaked’. I’ve perfomed a comprehensive site backup.
Sorry for the downtime.
Today, I removed this site’s ailing motherboard (the PS2 ports, the mouse ports, and the USB ports were all non-functional) to be sent back for replacement.
I replaced it with a Shuttle AK38N motherboard with a 2400 Athlon processor and 512 megs of PC3200 DDR 184 pin DIMM memory. Our BogoMIPS (which you remember is a number indicating how many million times per second your computer can do absolutely nothing) went from 3329.22 under the old configuration to 3997.29 under this new setup.
Everything seems to have installed smoothly. Please let me know if you spot any problems, and enjoy the speedy new system!
I also updated the forum to version 1.30final.
I also performed a comprehensive system backup with a new tool — Acronis TrueImage 6.0. It’s a nice graphical backup/restore utility, but unfortuantely, it’s an offline backup — it cannot be run on a ‘live’ operating system, so the site was down for about 75 minutes during the backup.