recordinghacks

It’s been too quiet around here lately. What say we start making some noise?

And recording it, too, of course. [rimshot]

Last Fall, the server that had hosted this website for the past 10 years blew a disk drive. All the site data was stored on a mirrored RAID, so we didn’t lose anything other than sleep. Really the biggest problem was that the server hadn’t, up to that point, been rebooted in over eight years. I don’t say it’s a problem that we hadn’t rebooted the server, but rather the opposite — it’s damn impressive that the server had been running well, with literally no maintenance, for years. Seeing a server with uptime of less than six months always feels a bit like someone screwed up.

Some time around February, the server blew up another drive. And then I think one more in March? The incidents started to blur together into a sort of prolonged anxiety attack. It didn’t help that the NOC staff was using 10-year-old disk drives to replace the 10-year-old disk drives that kept dying.

Anyway, the ISP where that leased server had been racked for the past decade decided to get out of the business, so we had to move the site to a new facility. That has been a mixed blessing. The new hardware is about 5 times faster, and costs less per month. But our entire application stack was 10 years out of date. Current revisions of the host environment have deprecated several core libraries, which basically means the site did not work AT ALL after we migrated it — just white screens of death at every URL. We’ve been updating code for weeks.

We’ve fixed most of the problems. If you see something that doesn’t work, leave a comment to let me know.

Well. The point of this was not supposed to be a depressing tour of old technology whose time had finally come, but rather to give the backstory on this glorious (?) rebirth of the website. I think all those smoked disk drives were maybe just a cry for help. The mic database just wanted some attention.

So, we’re running on current versions of OS and application environment and database, and we’ve fixed a bunch of bugs in the code, and we’ve added a handful of mics to the database. Many more updates are in the works.

Related posts:

Friday Featuritis: New microphone search option Jonathan Coulton Interview

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