In case you were wondering
In case you were wondering what happened - I’ve just moved servers. My website (and email) have been squatting on Leonardo’s (formerly Hard Reality’s) servers since I left there in October. They’ve been dropping less and less subtle hints that I needed to get off there ever since. Fortunately I don’t think any of the senior management were aware of my lingering presence, otherwise I would have been evicted pretty damn sharpish, no notice to quit or other pleasantries.
So ever since October I have been searching for a new home. I was going to run things over my ADSL here, but what with the odd ADSL outage plus my server failing from time-to-time due to a dodgy video-card connection, I thought it perhaps unwise. Then I thought I might get my own hosting setup, perhaps a DSVR, or sharing JCs, or somesuch other $10-a-month type thing.
Anyway, eventually our burgeoning relationship with Liv4now came to the rescue. I’ve been helping Ewan out on the technical side, and he very kindly allowed me to make myself at home on their shiny new Rackshack server. So I moved not only sumption.org, but our miscallaneous new domains including bradonpace.com, fad-mag.com, fadwebsite.com and wavepeople.com too.
Only problem was… well, there were lots of problems. First, I informed Ralph at Leonardo that I was in the process of moving, and he jumped the gun a bit and took my website down (thank god he left the email running). So I had a couple of days of Leonardocompany that I could do nothing about, while management of my domain passed over from the god-awful and horrendously expensive Netnames to the much nicer cheap-and-very-cheerful UKReg. I finally got that sorted, and DNS setup through Rackshack, when more problems reared their heads.
During the cross-over, I’d tried to set up FTP access on my server for Ralph to log in. Unfortunately, it proved to be impossible. I made him an account, but it kept telling me that it didn’t have permission to FTP in. A bit of searching found some articles saying that an account needed “logon locally” permissions to be able to use FTP - well, it looked to me like Ralph’s account already had that, but I fiddled with Active Directory to try and make certain. Unfortunately, and quite without realising it, in doing so I denied logon locally permissions to every other user. I didn’t find out until I came down to London with my laptop, tried to a reboot, and was told that “this system does not allow you to logon interactively”. Huh? Basically, I couldn’t get into the laptop, even the local administrator account was barred. Some hair-tearing and nightmare-scenario-imagining followed - what if I couldn’t ever get in again, and I had to reinstall everything - would take me weeks to get back to normal.
I couldn’t do anything until I returned to Sheffield (and meanwhile Gill called me to say that she had the same problem with her computer). When I did get back I had a brainwave - managed to get into my laptop by rebooting with F8 down and selecting “last known good configuration”. All well and good, although I was very loathe to reboot again in case I never got in. So I got to work on Gill’s PC instead - managed to logon to the server directly, played again with the Active Directory permissions, rebooted and retried Gill’s maching all to no avail. In the end I gave up for the night - it wasn’t until next morning that I noticed that I’d borrowed Gill’s network cable to stick into my new Linux box, so there was no way her machine could pick up the new settings from the server, it was just running on cached details. I plugged in the network cable, tried again and… joy of joys… it worked. I still didn’t risk rebooting the laptop for another few days, but in the event that worked too.
Anyway, all this messing had seriously detracted from sorting out my website problems. And by the time I got this far, I had more stuff to keep me busy. Apart from the usual ever-mounting pile of work, 52 CDs had arrived in the post (individually parcelled from Hong Kong - think the postman had a field day!) which Keld wanted me to rip for his new online music service, Iced Mango. I set about getting Easy CD-DA Extractor on all 3 machines, trying for the life of me to figure out Windows Media Encoder (turns out I needed a very old version, as the latest one doesn’t do ASFs), etc etc etc. For some bizarre reason, Easy CD-DA, which I have always found to be a most wonderful program, started to misbehave, crashing part-way through extracting CDs. Bummer. More time trying to figure that out. Still no solution as yet.
Oh yeah, the other thing I had to do to in the midst of all this was convert my entire site to run on the new server (remember, that was what we were talking about). ASPs to PHP (used ASP2PHP for some of this, but mostly good old blood2sweat2tears), NT Perl to Unix Perl (apart from changing Mail::Sender calls to straight sendmail, mainly all down to file permissions, file permissions, file permissions. God, it’s years since I had to get to grips with chmod, and its so easy to screw something up with it and blame the code. I didn’t realise that to read in a text file with a Perl script, the directory it’s in has to have execute permissions set. Bizarre. And it all brings back reverse memories, as this time 5 years ago I was busy converting all my Unix Perl scripts to run on NT).
Anyway, I thought I had it all ready, but had no time to upload the bloody great thing (it was 64Mb zipped, although I’ve since been through it and weeded out lots of files I’d uploaded temporarily to show friends, and lots of fucking Frontpage _vti_bollocks too, something which has always annoyed me as I’ve never used Frontpage and it just makes things messy and awkward. Now the whole site weighs in at 60Mb uncompressed). But I was dashing off to London again… no problem, I thought. I’ll just upload it all when I get in to Liv4now.
So along comes the next problem - and one I still can’t get to the bottom of. I plugged into their network, switched IP configuration (using IP Changer) and… couldn’t see the network. Or anything. Couldn’t even ping or tracert to the gateway. Completely fucked. Spent hours fiddling, disabling bits of software, shutting off services, all to no avail. Wierd thing is, this happened before - I used to have a Xircom card installed as well as my Vaio’s built-in RJ45 port, because pre-IP Changer that seemed the easiest way to keep the 2 network settings on the machine without constantly switching. One day the Xircom just gave up the ghost on the Liv4now network, just like that, and I assumed that the card was fucked because when I moved to the built-in port it worked OK. But now I’m not so sure… as soon as I got back home yesterday I plugged in to my network to see whether the built-in socket was screwed up too, but after a 2-second delay it worked fine. So… anyone have any idea whassup?
Anyway, the upshot was I had to wait until yesterday when I got home and everything finally more-or-less worked before I could start uploading my 60Mb. And then I had to do my little bit of chmodding and tweaking the CGIs (still have to get the comments working on this thing… but that should take a matter of minutes) and… I HAVE MY WEBSITE BACK AGAIN! YAY!!!