Allpar And Steam Again

So I bet you’re wondering what’s been going on today. Forums up, forums down. Forums up but not working quite right. Forums down again…

Well - the makers of Invisionboard suggested moving to MySQL 4.1, so we checked the necessary boxes in WebHost Manager and it installed! in just about five minutes. Wondrous! But they suggested then running some after-scripts to update Apache and PHP.

Oops. Guess we should have ignored them.

Everything was working fine until we ran their scripts, and a whole BUNCH of things dropped out - things we rely on, like mcrypt and Zend and ioncube. Also, of course, as happens every time some dust blows in the wrong direction, the posts and sessions databases went screwy and we had to fix them. So we had Garage, then we didn’t. Then we did. Then we didn’t.

We ended up bringing our ISP into the act, and Ian Coffey fixed the myriad of problems Cpanel had caused with php and installed a bunch of things we hadn’t been able to, partly because the php installation was so badly damaged. That brought the Garage back.

Search, you might have noticed, disappeared again. We had another problem wtih performance but I’m going to try putting it back on over the weekend. Cross your fingers. At least now I have a performance monitor set up that lets me know when the server is slow, not just when it’s down.

We have a memory upgrade coming next week, since we’re consistently running about 100K-250K of swap memory.

Meanwhile, on the steam front, the new boiler seems to be oversized, so we have panting radiators and a gurgling/boiling sound you wouldn’t believe coming from one radiator - which, to be fair, was a problem with the old boiler, too. We’re trying to find a local plumber who charges less than $150 an hour to fix it. Oh, and the new boiler seems to have a leak…joy.

Until next time…]]>