So I got the edits back on the book and USS Mariner went down. Three days later, it came back up today. A brief chronology:
Wednesday:
– Carl Everett is tossed off the team, and then the M’s trade for Ben Broussard. USSM sees a huge traffic spike that takes down the shared webserver and the shared database server. Our host shuts the site down.
– We eventually get a temporary page where I can start throwing up straight HTML updates. Good thing I was around back in the old days and know how to write those. You want Ajax and Web 2.0? I offer the h2 tag, and use ordered lists.
– Using parts from my last PC and stuff I’ve had hanging around, I build a new server

Thursday:
– At about 2 in the morning, I got up and drove to Enumclaw to volunteer for RAMROD
– At about 6:45, I drove home. This took forever.
– I get home, finish up prepping the server, and drive it Tukwilla. On the way down, I see that 405 North is just as bad as it was when I tried to get hom earlier.
– I take I-5 N back from Tukwilla to I-90. I-5 is a crawl.
– At some point, the hosting guys tell me they expect they’ll have the box ready later that night. That doesn’t happen.
– I go to sleep, exhausted from having slept maybe 2 hours since USSM went down

Friday:
– ETA for the new box is that evening. That turns out to be 8, when I get an email that I should check the box and then call in if it’s cool.
– At about 8:20 I call in and get put on hold. I take the “leave us a message” option, but it blips and says “no message to send” and there’s no option to re-record or anything.
– I file a support request
– I call back in and sit on hold for 45m, during which I bitch to Jeff Shaw on IM
– I give up and go to sleep

Saturday
– At eleven, having heard nothing, I call in and get someone, who promises to look into it and call me back
– I call back sometime after noon, and they’ve made no progress. We both work on it while on the phone and bring it up at about 2

I have a lot of mixed emotions about the whole thing. On the one hand, yeah, we’re around in large part because of digital forest’s largesse, so I understand that we’re getting their tech’s support as it’s available, and got bumped every time a paying customer had any kind of issue. I totally understand.

But from my side, this was three days of troubleshooting, slipped estimates, during which my blood was 90% stress and 10% caffeine. It was three days to getting my box online, and if that hadn’t worked, I don’t know what I would have done next – I was considering buying a rack server from Dell and having it overnighted, and that would have been a couple thousand dollars, maybe.

Or turning out the lights.

Anyway, it’s back to the book revisions. It sucks that I can’t celebrate the resurrection of USSM with a rush of joyous content, but I’ve only got a few weeks before I need this draft turned around, and the book, unfortunately, has to be a priority right now.