| Monday, 2 May 2005 | 1:08 PM |
| | Conversion Part II Oh my God it was more work than we ever thought it would be. Had we known... Anyway, we are at the miraculous point were a basic forum, blog, etc actually run again. All this work we have been doing and it felt like we were doing everything blind. We have a new way of doing everthing, and it is much more flexible yet much more formal. And a huge undertaking.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel -- we are actually working on making things look nice rather than just trying to get it to work.  And the pace of things is starting to quicken finally as we cross a certain threshold in the learning curve of the new framework we are using.
The great thing is that the whole Network54 site is just one possible application of the engine that we are creating. We'll be able to slice and dice our software into all sorts of interesting things. And in version 3.0, so will you...
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Sunday, 20 March 2005 | 10:49 AM |
| | Conversion Work on version 2.0 of Network54 has come to the point where the forums, blogs, and votelets are nearly done, and where we started to look at the remaining items we have to do (which are surprisingly numerous). There are some issues with the way things are done and the way we want them to work. We have a rather detailed plan for version 3.0 (and an outline for version 4, 5, and 6 even!). To get from here to there will be a lot of work, but we have found a project that could be the underpinnings for v3.
If we were to convert our current v2 code to this new model, we would be very close to achieving v3 possibly a year earlier. It will delay a public demonstration of v2 by a month or so. However, since it provides the tools for doing the parts of v2 that are not yet complete, we have determined that the actual release date will not be affected. Slow us down up front to speed things on later.
It is hard to swallow. We are so easer to show off it hurts. But the thought of getting both v2 and v3 out this year is too much to pass up...
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Friday, 4 February 2005 | 2:10 PM |
| | Server Nightmares We have had the very unfortunate experience of having multiple simultaneous hardware failures occur across our servers. Everything is finally back up, but some of the equipment we are using is very old (back when our only solution to high priced servers was to build them ourselves). Couple that with the fact the the Realms/Photos service's software is also old and unclustered, and you get a cluster of a type I shall not write here. 
v2 has this part of the engine rewritten and will have failover features like most the site has now. Also, we already had ordered some equipment to replace some of the aging equipment. So if the timing had been different (if the machines could have waited a little longer) we would not have lost image services either because of the new equipment or the new software. No such luck though, and we easily lost a week of work on v2/3.  And we ordered new equipment to replace all our old stuff completely. We’ll actually gain rack space. And debt.
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Thursday, 27 January 2005 | 9:40 PM |
| | The slow pace of software development Things in software development seem to go in spurts. Some things move along real quick and other things take far more time than you would ever expect. Even after years of experience, some single feature comes back to bite you in the ***. Permissions (users and groups, etc) were that one for me. And you can't leave that one out...
Anyhow, things are picking up again. Forums themselves are almost done in v2. A few things remain like finishing the new WYSIWYG editor for IE and FireFox/Mozilla/Netscape. That involves the whole new attachments thing. You no longer have to worry about realms just to upload a picture as part of a message, and the pictures (and other files) stay around for as long as the message they are contained in stays around. No more temp files! And for most people, they will never have to worry about what a quota is. Hope to finish that off next week.
This week I want to finish the spell checker. Only one more day left! It is 9:40pm on Thursday. I got to go home...
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Friday, 21 January 2005 | 4:24 PM |
| | Helping Take a Bite Out of Spam We're jumping on the bandwagon and altering links in posts so that they are not followed by Google to improve spammer's page rank. We are putting in exceptions however: Forum Owners and people that have Moderator privileges won't have their links mangled. We assume that you all trust them!
More info:
http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | | Thursday, 9 September 2004 | 4:16 PM |
| | The perils of software updates II In the end it was part of ZPS 4.0.1 (fixed in 4.0.1a). An amazing waste of time tracking that one down. Oh well. It is fixed now. And next on the list was a big hold-your-breath when RedHat Linux Server 3 Update 3 came down the pipe. We did a machine or two a day and all is fine. Good to have something go smoothly.
Now I can continue cracking at v2/v3 of Network54... | | Wednesday, 25 August 2004 | 2:25 PM |
| | The perils of software updates Oh the perils of software updates. Ever read an article in a newspaper or magazine that talked about how some huge number of computers, supposedly managed by perfessionals, don't get some security patch for a very long time (in the authors opinion -- though if these machines get breached then that opinion is absolutely correct!)? Well, the reason is the theory of unintended consequences.
When that new version of the software comes out, it has not been in widespread deployment yet. So little (or big) bugs may have crept in and not been noticed. So the name of the game is let someone else be the fool and take the arrows. That is, until there is a compelling reason to force the issue. We generally take this stance with upgrades, though not with security updates. It is too expensive for us to take that risk on the security side.
Well in this case it was an upgrade. Actually a couple upgrades and one not too important security update. About once a month, barring any major security issues, I update some third party components. We use an IP to geographic location database that gets updated every month, sometime around the first. So about half way through the month, I get the update (sometimes it was updated twice that month...) and install it. Any access library gets updated at the same time. I send out the update in the morning and then wait until lunch to do the next thing on the list, assuming nothing went wrong.
So when I did this last week, and all went well, I looked for ohter things to update. There had been lots of updates to ZPS in the last few months, going from 3.6.0 to 4.0.0 and more recently to 4.0.1. One web server was upgraded to ZPS 4.0.0 to test when its OS was updated. So it seemed safe to update all web servers to 4.0.1, a bug fix release from the one we had no problems with.
Since that went well, I updated the kernels on all the web servers too. It was a security update that did not affect us, but it is a good idea to keep on top of these things anyhow. Restarted the web servers and had not problems. Those didn't come until later...
N54/Steven Roussey/My Weblog | |
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