Wednesday, June 20, 2001

Right now, I'm working on one of the database servers. That's why Recently Updated and Discuss are down, and why things are a bit sluggish. (I also noticed a couple timeouts while posting earlier. Ugh.) What happened was, after things were running pretty good for a couple weeks, I must have gotten cocky. I took things down last night to install the new service pack on both databases. I was hoping it might clear up an intermittent connection problem between the servers that happening with increasing frequency (though not yet causing serious problems). Well, when I was done installing it on both machines, one of them wouldn't talk to the other at all. I tried everything, but I finally had to reinstall SQL Server on the one to get it back how it was. I'm still recovering from that, because it's damn time-consuming when you're fixing things by trial-and-error and each trial and each error takes 30, 60, 90 minutes or more to complete. That's what happens when you're working with these honking database files. I'm confident we're on the rode to recovery, though. I estimate we should be fully back online by early evening. (I'm horrible at estimating, of course.) BTW, no data was in danger during these traumatic episodes!