But were we ever really gone?

Two weeks ago today, the MWP server started having some nasty issues. It was a holiday weekend, and I had family obligations, so I was unable to do much troubleshooting until the following Wednesday. For the next 48 hours I attempted to work with my host to find a solution, and it always came back to them attempting to upsell their services. After a logging database table crashed on Thursday, making the site unreachable for about 12 hours, I decided enough was enough and began seeking a new host.

After venting my plight to GantMan, long time friend of MWP and creator of the completely awesome Drink, Drank, Drunk Deck <blantant plug>, he graciously donated a spot on his server. What followed over the next 48 hours was the porting of 6+ GB's of files and 100's of MB's of database information. At around 10 PM Sunday evening the DNS records were changed, and for some of you, the switch from one server to the other was completely transparent -- while some of you had to wait the full 24+ hours for the DNS record to propagate to your ISP.

The site came back up with everything available but the Quake server and with four or five tiny issues -- mainly configuration items I had missed. Over the past week, all of the known issues have been ironed out, the rest of the non site stuff has been ported over and it appears things are back to normal.

On a personal note, what started as a frustrating situation became a fantastic experience. The new server is completely different from the old, so I have had a bunch of new toys to play with. It is a real pleasure to see all of the back end procedures worked flawlessly and reassuring to know our backups are golden. But most of all, I was able to take what I have learned over the past several years and apply it in a "real world" situation, migrating a pretty damn big site to a new server in about 48 hours (most of that time waiting for the files to upload). At the end of the day, it's a really, really good feeling.

Please feel free to post in this thread if you notice anything amiss. The only thing that may have been lost during our server problems are Tracker accounting statistics. This should have only happened if the server happened to be offline when your client made its last announce and you closed the client while it still had the red light (or arrow).

Hee-hee.

Twenty years as an IT professional, and especially my experience during Hurricane Katrina, has taught me that sometimes you just have to go for it. I could have spent several days testing and getting everything all perfect and stuff, but live production tests are so much more... Fun!

That would be the DNS name server.

Yes it would.

Excellent, good to know it went so smoothly for you, it must have been a mammoth task, hey, migrating from one pc to another is big enough for me, so this must be that to the Nth power

Good to see that you could find a suitable solution to the problem so quickly. I was in Canada around the time that you would have been having problems, so wasn't around to notice.

So, how was Canada Pablo?

Cool, looking forward to it!