A few weeks ago we had a failure on the web site. Actually a hard failure, a BSOD, which I haven't seen in years. Of course I didn't know it was a BSOD. We were having issues on the web site so I rebooted the server on a Friday afternoon while my kids were on spring break. I was working with them in the background and waiting for the server to come back up.
And waiting.
Finally about 10 minutes later I realized that it wasn't coming up. And this was the one server without a remote, out of band card. Actually, come to think of it, both servers are missing the card. Not that it would have helped, but I decided to switch to the new web server.
I'd been testing, but some of the software we use is specific to a URL, as in licensed to a URL. So a few things were barely tested. Apparently blogs were one of them. However I switched and the articles and forums worked
I packed up the kids, drove to the co-lo and found the BSOD. That made me nervous even though the server rebooted fine. Still I hate to roll back and I'd been meaning to move onto this server, so I left it and went back to work after feeding the kids.
So one of the first things I find that weekend is blogs are broken. Now we run the Community Server, 1.0 or 1.1 from Telligent Systems. Brian installed it and I had no idea how it worked. So I turned it over to him. The only real difference was the we moved from W2K to W2K3, which could be a big difference.
After a lot of late night emails back and forth Sunday night we were stumped. I'd copied things over, setup the IIS site as close as I could and it was erroring out. So I called our contract programmer, enabled his account (speaking of which.... yep, disabled again), and set him working on it. He spent a 3-4 part time nights looking at it, going back and forth with me and we couldn't figure things out.
So I started digging in. It's an ASP.NET app, supposedly simple to setup, but I couldn't find any issues. The posts at communityserver.org didn't generate any help. I did get some help from
Michael Coles who volunteered to look through things and give some hints. I really appreciate his help and a lot of suggestions, most of which I hadn't thought of. It didn't help, but he had me moving forwad.
So finally this weekend I had some time and setup a new web site and copied over the folders. I moved the site from a virtual directory to a root web site, new DNS, new host, etc. and had to make a few changes in the db.
And it worked.
Crazy. It wasn't a W2K3, at least I think it wasn't, but in any case, it's now working.
Supposedly coming out today.
We'll see as the few announcements I saw were without links posted.
In writing for a tech book one of the things that happens is a copy editor looks over your work and comments on the spelling mistakes, miswordings, grammatical errors and all the other "English" stuff you hated in high school. But it's good because many of us write more casually than is appropriate is some places, so it helps to have a second set of eyes. The problem comes in, however, when we're talking about technical terms, which the editor may not be aware of since they are usually non-technical people.
So one of the comments I got back from my first chapter was that I used "SQL Servers" to refer to the installed product in some places and "the SQL Server" in others. This was intentional, such as "The CPU performance of the SQL Server can be measured..." However the editor didn't like that. Her argument was that would I say "I used the Microsoft Word?"
I wouldn't, and then I got to spend 20 minutes writing a long email to explain how they are different and "SQL Server machines" isn't appropriate because of instances and "the SQL Server" refers to the specific instance and sometimes the specific database. It's a term that's colloquial and easy for me to drop into when I should be more specific. Granted, I expect that most readers of the book will know what I mean, but I guess I've got some rewriting to do.