Much of the last 24 hours has been spent seizing those rare moments during which my server — migrated through no desire of mine to Web Host Plus — is up and on the network, and using them to perform a migration of my own, namely to the server in my cellar.
I’m knackered, but a lot has been accomplished today. DNS and e-mail have now been fully migrated, including Web mail and mailing lists. The Web site, too — which you’re now reading — is also up and running on the new (well, actually quite old) server.
The main thing that’s not yet back up is our gallery of photos. That’s because it’s 19 Gb of data, which would be slow to copy from a reliable server on a fast network. Well, I have to copy it from a machine that keeps crashing and is not on a fast network. It could be a couple of weeks before I manage to get all of my data off it… if I’m lucky. I don’t want to even contemplate the notion of not being able to recover all of my data.
I thought I’d left this kind of sysadmin drudgery behind me when I stopped working. Indeed, I moved my domain to dedicated hosting to reduce the downtime and maintenance that I had repeatedly endured when I hosted it myself on a domestic DSL line. Little did I know that I would get to enjoy such advantages for barely a year before falling victim to the worst kind of professional incompetence: that with no sense of responsibility for one’s customers.
And so caliban.org is back on a domestic DSL line, albeit one that has proved itself more reliable than those I had in the US. The upstream bandwidth is also somewhat better.
Anyway, don’t bother looking for new photos — or old ones — in the near future. I’ll announce when — if? — they’re once again available.