This afternoon I brought a new web server online. This state-of-the-art server has much more memory, more hard drive that we’ll ever use, an Intel dual-core processor, and a few other nice features. While the fact that it is much faster is probably masked to everyone on the Internet because that access is limited by the speed of the internet, processes will finish more quickly and the system should feel less “sticky”.

The other thing that got well tested today was the backup and recovery process. I was able to take the daily backup, restore that on the new server, and have the new server up and running in less than an hour. I’m quite happy that the backup and recovery process was sufficiently comprehensive and worked well. About 3 a.m. every morning the system makes a backup of all the user software and data and pushes that backup to a different computer here. That computer keeps a week’s worth of backups. Every Saturday morning the backup is also pushed to my iMac Mini computer where it is written to a 2gb memory stick. From there I take it over to my credit union and put that in our safe deposit box, exchanging it for an older memory stick. I think there are enough backups that I should always be able to recover from a problem.

At work we’ve been looking at a new set of web services now available from Amazon Web Services (the same company that brings us Amazon dot Com and Amazon One Click!). One of their services is storage which is very inexpensive. My next step with this system is to link the backups to the Internet disk storage at Amazon Web Services. I only pay for the bandwidth to push the data into the storage. There’s no cost for the storage except to push the data there or to pull it back. I think this would be a good addition to the backup and recovery process.

So, the new server is up and running. Hopefully everything on the server is running the way that it used to work. It’s a nice Saturday afternoon!

I finally had to do something about the weblog server going offline within minutes of when we would leave to go somewhere for a few days. When we left a couple of weeks ago for Colorado Springs, by the time I got to my brother’s house in Green River, the Qwest DSL modem had frozen up and the weblogs were offline until I got back home four days later to reset the modem. Qwest supposedly did a software upgrade in the middle of the night after I called their support line, but it’s pretty hard to tell if something changed. So, I ordered a telephone interface to X10 devices so I can now reset the modem by calling a telephone number and entering some codes. The equipment arrived today. It’s hooked up. It’s working. I have long-distance control! Now it’ll be something else that goes wrong.

The new version of WordPress has been available for some time. I don’t like to install first releases of anything, so I’ve been waiting for a couple of bugfix releases of the new version. That has happened. The new version is now at 2.0.4, so I’ve upgraded my weblog to this version. I’ll try it out for a week or so before trying to upgrade anyone else.

What’s motivating this upgrade is that my grandson Michael has asked for a blog. I’ve decided to set him up this weekend and put him on the new version of the blog. That should keep his mother busy figuring out what is different in this new version over her current version of the weblog. So, Michael, sometime tomorrow your new weblog will be available. I’m looking forward to reading it!

The switch from CableOne to Qwest is complete, I think. This stuff just shouldn’t be this hard. I started on Saturday thinking I’d be completely switched by Sunday morning. That wasn’t to be so. I think the weblogs have been available only since about 6 p.m. on Monday evening.

WARNING: This now gets long and technical….

The first problem was rearranging the cabling and getting all of the computers to cooperate with each other. In the old arrangement the cable came into the basement storage room, so the cable modem was there along with the wireless router/firewall. The two main servers are also in the basement storage room (it’s much cooler there in the summer time) and all the other computers are in the office upstairs. In the new system, the DSL modem and the wireless router/firewall are in the office by my computer. All the other computers are where they always were. There is one cable going from upstairs to downstairs, so the wireless router/firewall had to come upstairs and an ethernet switch downstairs. It should have been a piece of cake. It wasn’t. After cabling everything up, none of the computers would talk to each other. All of them could get out to the internet, but the inside network was not working at all. I spent a couple of hours going up and down the stairs trying all different kinds of configurations with no luck at all. Finally, because the wireless router/firewall was from Netgear and the ethernet switch was from Netgear, I decided to call their technical support and pay $32.50 for a half hour of support. The support person was in India (often a very bad sign), but they assured me I was talking with a highly-experienced Level Three Technician. They were right. This fellow took a few minutes to understand the configuration and quickly zeroed in on two problems. First, the wireless router/firewall had lost its configuration in all this shuffle. There is a small switch that causes the device to revert to factory default settings. I must have somehow bumped the switch. The second problem was the anti-virus software on all my PC’s in the office. They all have a personal firewall along with anti-virus. As soon as I turned off the personal firewall, everything worked just fine. The $32.50 was well worth it. I should have called a couple of hours earlier!!

After the network had been reconfigured and everything was working with the Qwest network, the next activity was to transfer my domain from CableOne to Qwest. That should also have been easy but it wasn’t. In fact, nothing in this change was easy! I use Network Solutions as the registrar for my domain “rnsmith.com”. They used to have a web page that made moving from one Internet Solution Provider (ISP) to another very easy. When we moved from Colorado Springs to Pocatello, a few clicks on the Network Solutions web page, fill in a few blanks, and the job was done. It must have worked too well, because that link is gone. Now the person doing the switch has to visit several different web pages each of which have a part of the puzzle. This puzzle was beyond me after a while because the instructions on the Qwest website didn’t match up with what Network Solutions wanted to have done. So, it was time to call the Network Solutions help desk. The young lady that took my call was also in India, but she definitely was NOT a Level Three Technician! About 45 minutes later I was no further ahead. Calling Qwest didn’t help, either. They wouldn’t do anything until after I had made the required changes at Network Solutions. However, Qwest did give me enough clues to figure out what had to be changed at Network Solutions for me to eventually get through that process.

So what do these changes have to do with anything? The Internet at the most fundamental level runs on numbers — specifically Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses. These are four groups of numbers separated by periods, such as 192.168.2.25 or something similar. These numbers are hard to remember, so the idea of domain names was invented and a system of converting domain names to IP addresses or IP addresses to domain names was developed. When CableOne was my ISP (Internet Service Provider), the IP address that they rented to me was one out of their pool of addresses. When I changed to Qwest, I was assigned a different IP address. So, I needed to tell all of the address servers around the world that the domain name RNSMITH.COM was now at IP address 71.39.213.121 instead of the old CableOne IP address. Since Network Solutions is the company providing name resolution services for “.COM” domain names, I had to change my data at Network Solutions to say that Qwest was now the authoritative service for converting RNSMITH.COM to an IP address. I further had to change my domain information so that Qwest and not CableOne was the technical provider of services. Once I had the data correct at Network Solutions, Qwest would not make any further entries into their systems until this new information had propogated out from Network Solutions. According to Qwest, this would take a minimum of 24 hours and I would have to wait until Sunday evening to make the rest of the changes.

Sunday evening, I finally saw that the Qwest domain name servers (these are the computers that convert names to addresses and vice versa) were finally responding that they were now authoritative for RNSMITH.COM. So, I went on to their administrative pages and began the process of trying to now say that ninablog.rnsmith.com and james.rnsmith.com, and heather.rnsmith.com … all were being served from IP address 71.39.213.121. Every time I tried to enter the information, it was rejected. I finally called their help desk once again. They couldn’t figure it out either, and got the same responses when they tried to enter the data. So, they took all of the information from me. I needed twelve names set up and associated with my IP address: www, ninablog, james, heather, jaelene, perry, lexie, slocum, pamela, leeann, eileen, and reunion. They assured me that it would be done, but would take four to eight hours to propogate through the system.

I got up this morning to find that it wasn’t done. Another call to Qwest. Repeated all of the information once again. The help desk woman took my cell phone number and said that they would be calling when the problem was resolved. About 10:30, someone from Qwest called and asked for the same information all over again. She didn’t understand what was written in the ticket. She said she’d be calling back later when it was completed. I hadn’t heard anything by 4 p.m. and none of the blogs were reachable, I called Qwest technical support once again. It was again necessary to go through all of the information because the help desk person didn’t understand what was in the ticket. I think it was because the ticket now was very long and the person didn’t want to have to read through the entire history on this ticket. This phone call took 45 minutes with 39 minutes on hold waiting and waiting. All this time I was driving to the CableOne office to return the cable modem and get that service turned off and then over to the hot tub place to return a sump pump, and then back home. Finally, they assured me, all twelve names were working. Just to make sure, I had him call up one of the pages and read me what the first post on the page said. It matched up with what I was expecting. It was about that time I pulled into the garage, came into the house, and verified that all of the weblogs are finally working. BUT!! There was a voice mail message on the home phone number from Qwest. The woman who called me on my cell phone (the number I had asked to be called at) and said that she’d be calling back?? Well, the next call she made to the home phone and not to the cell phone, leaving a message that she needed more information. No wonder at 4 p.m. nothing had happened. Argh!!

The reason for making the switch is first economic — my cost goes down from $124 a month to $58 a month and then performance — at CableOne I was getting about a 1.4mb connection at best and often much slower than that. A Qwest the upper end is 7mb and there is a guarantee of 2.4mb minimum. That should make the weblogs feel a bit snappier. However, I’ve also noticed that Qwest’s method for administering the naming services is very primitive. CableOne had a very slick web interface that worked very, very well. I think that it would take about half the time to move from Qwest to CableOne as moving the other way because there is so much more that I can do myself at CableOne where I’m depending on a technician to do it for me at Qwest. It may be time for me to put up my own name servers and become authoritative for my own domain. We’ll see. I’ve got a couple of more domains that I want to put up. When that happens I might just do the stuff myself and spare me the pain of having to deal with clueless help desks.

This was much too painful and it shouldn’t be. The bright spot was the Netgear Professional Support! It cost me a little money, but the result was that I got top-notch support. It seemed that the rest of the support people were far from useful — more like a “helpless desk”.

I wrote this on my Treo cell phone yesterday and sent it — but it didn’t get delivered. Turns out I had a senior moment and sent it to the wrong e-mail address! So, belatedly, here’s what I wrote yesterday:

Some computer systems make a distinction between a birthday and a birthdate. A birthday occurs annually on the same date every year. A birthdate, however, occurs once in a person’s lifetime. So today is the anniversary of my birthdate as I celebrate a birthday. It is just a pretty normal, everyday birthday. It’s Sunday and I’m in church. This is a Ward Conference Sunday so I’m in the City Creek Ward. This afternoon I’ll attend the Pocatello 1st Ward meetings.

We did our celebrating yesterday, on Nina’s sixtieth birthday. There was a boat and RV show in Pocatello so we started there. The show was very small, consequently about ten minutes later we were done there. After lunch we drove over to Soda Springs. Nina had prepared dinner: roast beef, gravy, mashed potatoes, corn (and other nefarious vegetables), and peach cobbler for desert. My sister Eileen and her husband Phil had come up from Utah as well. We had a lovely visit and I introduced Eileen to her blog (coming Real Soon Now). Just for the record, we had Nina’s birthday dinner last week in Idaho Falls. We’re done celebrating our birthdays now for another year. We’ll both certainly have fewer birthdays in future years as we have had in years past. That’s OK as the alternative to celebrating a birthday is not in my plans. There are still too many things yet to do in my remaining years of life and anniversaries of my birthdate yet to celebrate.

That was it. Now for a small update on the picture album process. When I wrote the picture album software, I knew how it worked because, of course, I wrote it. I knew, for instance, that apostrophes and quotation marks in the names of picture files or in the topic index would cause the programs not to work so I’d never put them in. Now, of course, I’ve put several other people up on this server with their own weblogs and have given them all the programs to upload pictures. They didn’t know the limitations and consequently they’d post pictures that couldn’t be displayed, or topics that’d disappear. I finally fixed all of those problems tonight. Picture file names can have spaces in them (the program converts the spaces to underscores). They can have apostrophes (the program now understands that). Topics can have apostrophes. If a topic has quotation mark(s), the program removes them. I wonder what other problems I’ve got in this code because I wrote it for me and not for the general public? I’m sure I’ll find out!

Now that a number of people are running web logs on my server, it was time to put in place a much better backup process. I don’t want to lose all those good words (or pictures)! I spent the evening figuring out how to make a nightly copy of all the files associated with all the weblogs. While it isn’t particularly rocket science, it did take a lot of trial and error and in the process, was a good learning experience for me. Now all of the weblogs are copied, compressed, and stored on a separate computer every morning about 1 a.m. The entire process takes about a half-hour and results in a backup copy of about a gigabyte of data. Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to shove that information off to a couple of CD’s so I can once a week make an archival copy. The other choice is to figure out how to have my iMac Mini write the whole backup to a DVD. That might be even more interesting.

At Macworld last week, among a host of other announcements, was an announcement of a new upgrade to the Apple operating system. I’m now two versions behind, so it’s time to do an upgrade. With the new version comes a very nice scripting and automation tool and that could be the ticket to automatically write the DVD once a week in the middle of the night (as long as an empty DVD is in the drive??).

Previously I would make a backup of the web server every couple of weeks, or when I remembered. Now it’ll get backed up every morning and a hard drive problem will no longer be catastrophic. Maybe that’ll help me sleep better at night?