A Progressive on the Prairie

Are the lights on????

After a 72+ hour outage here, the blog is back — I hope.

Many thanks to the South Dakota War College and S.D. Watch for letting people know this wasn’t a voluntary shut down. (A bit more on them in another forthcoming post.) The problem was that the servers used by my web host apparently crashed entirely and the web host evidetnly could not cope in trying to get them restored.

I probably should have had some concern about two weeks ago when a few days of posts simply disappeared. The entire experience has led to a couple things already.

While I had a back-up of my blog database, I didn’t have a backup of anything that isn’t in the database. Since that covers a lot of ground, the first thing I did when the servers were back up was copy everything to my local hard drive.

Second, when servers being down also means you can’t contact technical support, it’s time to look for a new web host. I have a new one signed up but dread the thought of trying to migrate everything to a new server. That likely will be my project over the Christmas/New Year’s holidays.

What did you miss while things were down? Well, there’s a couple posts from last weekend you might not have seen. I also didn’t post items on Dan Fogelberg’s death and the story in the Argus about state government’s legal bills. Both seem a tad dated now so I likely will forgo them entirely. I will also have a marginalia post on things from elsewhere in cyberspace you might have missed

Hopefully, the lights here will stay on for a while and at least until I have things all ready to go on the new web host.

A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn’t even know existed can render your own computer unusable.

Leslie Lamport, May 28, 1987