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It Worked!

Entry 1298, on 2011-05-19 at 22:43:53 (Rating 2, Activities)

I'm not going to comment on the pathetic excuse for a budget our (New Zealand) government had the temerity to release today. I'll think about it for a while and then comment. Maybe after that time I will have seen some merit in it, or more likely it will seem even worse than it does now!

No, in this entry I want to comment on something far more positive: how well my server transition went yesterday. For a few years now my main web server has been an old Power Mac G4 and I wanted to upgrade to something slightly more modern: a Power Mac G5 (yes, I did say it was only slightly more modern).

The problem is that my server runs 8 web sites, although only one is very substantial, and has many databases running in the background. There are also some custom configurations it requires to run. Of course I wanted the web sites to be down for the minimum amount of time during the transition. Oh, and to make things slightly more complicated I had to do all this in my spare time between doing "real work".

There was one factor on my side though: I was using Macs!

As you can probably tell from my triumphant tone (and the title of this blog) it worked really well! All of the web sites are running correctly. The databases (including this blogging system) are all running as expected, and the new system is significantly faster than the old one (although the upstream speed of my internet connection is still a bit slow for this purpose).

So I installed new hardware, a much more modern operating system, new versions of PHP, MySQL, and Apache, and the latest versions of all the web sites, plus I maintained the data (over a million records) from all of the databases with a total down time of about 2 minutes. And now, 24 hours later, I haven't found any problems.

So that's my happy computer story. On most days I encounter enough weird computer problems which I have to waste a lot of time to solve, so it's nice to win for a change!

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