7 February (Part 1) - No conspiracy, just a cock-up
This website runs on a facility situated somewhere in Docklands operated by a
friend I have known since the Internet began. On Saturday his server suffered a
few short term outages and on Sunday morning the decision was taken to update
the firmware on one of the Cisco routers. I was speaking to my friend while
he did the job. At the 89% mark it hit a serious problem and subsequently it was
found that the server’s operating system was corrupted. It was necessary to
completely rebuild the server software and restore a huge amount of data from
backups. My mail system was unavailable for 25 hours, the web pages took
45 hours to come back on line and it was a further two before I was able to
update the website again, the latter being very frustrating because you were
unable to see anything later than last Friday’s entries.
Being reliant on a small company for service has its risks, but on the other hand
I am not charged for the web space nor are limits imposed on the size of the site
or the bandwidth consumed.
Thanks to those who phoned to ask what was going on and the rather larger number whose
emails (several suggesting that Bexley council had sabotaged something) arrived
when that service was restored by around mid-day yesterday.
While nothing could be published I took the opportunity to redesign the site
menu which is stuck too much in the past with too many references to pages
that have been unchanged since September 2009. The menu and associated systems
can only work on line and local off line testing is not easily possible. Rather than
take the whole site down while the new system is tested it will be introduced later
this week on the Home page only at the outset. Things could get messy for a while until
the snags are sorted out.