Diary: November 2009

I'm Back!

You may have noticed that, for the first time in 9 years, this diary had fallen silent for not one but two entire months. You would be forgiven for assuming that this meant that I had died; however, you would be incorrect. I am very much alive. Bigger and better than ever.

Well, bigger at least - I've been on holiday in America for a month, eating bad meals three times a day every day. It was brilliant. Everything we did when we weren't eating was also brilliant - so much so that I feel the need to upload all ...

Read full entry

Situation Report

Today I'm in the middle of moving my sites and services to new machines, finishing my new monitoring/alert system because last week monit failed to tell me a server had disappeared, I'm finishing the new CMS, upgrading bits of an old CMS, fixing problems appearing on the new servers, creating 3 new client mini-sites, and still trying to clear the 60+ e-mails that arrived while I was away on holiday. I've also written an excellent nginx control script, which I'll release on richardterry.co.uk next year.

We're also trying to buy a house ...

Read full entry

Bye bye, old server

I have just executed my main web server - I watched it destroy itself on my command, before shutting down for good. Faithful to the end.

This means that I have now finished the move from the old web server to the new one, and I'm pleased to report that I seem to have completed the transition with minimal disruption for client sites.

I used nginx on the new server as a remote proxy, pointing at the old server. I then changed the DNS and waited for the caches to update, before locking the user-changeable areas for a few minutes ...

Read full entry

Hello, new server

Everything seems to be running just fine on the new server, and even all of my personal sites are back up. Well, almost all; some of the old ones I haven't touched for years and I don't want to keep going, so I took the opportunity to spring clean my domains and drop them.

They were mostly insignificant so I doubt anyone will miss them, but at this time of year at least one person always asks me for the TCMI, which was until this weekend over at perl.uzeweb.com. Most of those scripts were about 10 ...

Read full entry