This was originally posted on Mortal Kombat Online’s forum. I’m reposting it here in case my friends might be interested in what was going on yesterday. You can read the original thread here.

Hey everyone.

So, we were down for approximately 18 hours. The downtime was due to our hosting provider migrating the site over to a newer, faster server. The site should now actually be more responsive and you should hopefully see less “server is busy” errors.

As for why it took so long and why we picked now, well.. there’s a story behind that. I’m putting it out here, in the interest of full disclosure, plus to get this annoyance off my chest.

A few years back, we had an extended downtime where we were down for about a week. During that downtime, we had been moved to another server by our hosting provider, due to the fact that the hard drives had failed on the old one. Shortly after the upgrade, I noticed that there was a problem with the motherboard. It wasn’t a show-stopper, but fixing it required some jury-rigging. The jury-rigging held up pretty well.

However, with the release of the new date coming closer and closer, I started realizing how much traffic we were getting and that we could do with slimming down system usage. For that, I wanted to get rid of the jury-rigging. So, we asked our hosting provider for a replacement motherboard. They responded yesterday by offering to move us to a new server.

I agreed, thinking they were going to take the hard drives from the old server and put them in the new server. Instead, they took the old drives and made them slaves to the existing drives.

It also didn’t help that when I logged into the server, I realized they put a completely different distribution of Linux than what we were using before. I called them and griped, because at this time I really don’t have time to learn a new distribution of Linux and configure it for our environment. They agreed to install our normal distribution, and did so.

… and when I logged in, I found they installed NONE of the software we needed. There wasn’t a web server, a mail server, or anything. By this point I was tired of depending on the hosting company and decided to fix it myself. To give a comparison, it was the equivalent of someone handing me a machine with Windows 7 Starter Edition and saying it was ready for use, without any of the necessary software. It took several hours, and by the time I went to bed at 1 AM CDT, I had everything but web services working.

Fortunately, when I got up this morning, I realized where I went wrong on the web services and got those fixed too.

Right now, I realize there are a couple of bugs in the site. For example, the online list isn’t working. However, I will be working with CCShadow to try and get them fixed as soon as we can.

Thank you for your patience while we get everything back to normal. :-)

Jennifer and I were at Walgreens this morning; I had thrown my back out yesterday and we were waiting for a prescription from my doctor to be filled. We saw the Easter stuff, and, well… she couldn’t help but be cute. :-)

Jennifer and I have three cats. The oldest, Lucy, has been with Jennifer since she was a kitten. Now fifteen years old or so, she hasn’t been doing well as of late. She’s back to her old self, but she’s still not 100%; she had gotten so bad at one point that we were afraid we were going to lose her. Still, like I said, she’s bounced back.

Now, Jennifer disputes this story, but I figure it’s a bit amusing…

The past few days, before we leave for work or come home from work, we’ve noticed Lucy has been laying on the kitchen table. She’s not supposed to do so, but she’s been doing so anyway; we figure she’s milking the “I’m dying” thing for all of it’s worth. We’d tell her to get down off the table, and she just gives us this look as if to say, “What are you going to do about it?” The answer is that I immediately pick her up off the table and place her on the floor, admonishing her.

Well, I try to be very careful about not disturbing the cats when they’re laying on the bed when we go to sleep. Last night, while in bed, I got Darcy (another of our cats) off the bed after he angered Lucy. I tried to get comfortable, but after the scuffle, Lucy had decided to snuggle in right against me where I couldn’t move without rolling on top of her. Worse, the position I was in was very uncomfortable and it was either bother a sleeping Jennifer or possibly hurt the cat laying right up against my back. I spent quite a bit of time in that position, praying Lucy would get bored and get off the bed.

After a while, I turned and looked at Lucy. She looked at me, with an almost smug look on her face.

“Well played, cat,” I muttered.