Coopers Consulting Solutions Limited

Phew!

So, after a very long weekend’s work, i was able to open up the HRMS Aces forums and send out a bulk email to all registered users to say it was all up and running again.

Was it worth it (i hear you ask)?  Hmm let me ponder out loud on that one.

To the untrained eye, there is very little difference between what the site looked like on Thursday 9th April and what it looked like when the doors reopened (late) on Monday 13th April.

Sure the main site URL has changed from www.hrmsaces.com to www.hcmaces.com, but i’ve set-up redirects to send everyone over to the correct place should they forget. This is a distracting change – in order to keep the downtime to a minimum i had to have a domain in place to receive the site before i could tinker with the DNS entried of the old domains. In due course everything will be shoved back under HRMSACES.COM and the other sites will be set to point to it. But i digress…

The eagle-eyed may spot that the version of the forum software (ubbthreads by the way, in case you were asking) has changed from 7.4.2 to 7.5.2, but again this is subtle – the version change effectively implemented a large number of bug fixes, and some minor functionality changes which have not yet been activated…The day-to-day bread and butter of the site is unchanged.

So what has changed to justify the 30-40 hours worth of work that i put in over the Easter weekend? In short, nothing! Nothing as far as Joe Public are concerned. And in theory that should be the way its done.

The site has been moved to a new server, run by different hosting company, under a new domain, owned by a different registrar!

If you want a more familiar analogy then think of it this way: On Thursday you banked with Lloyds TSB (say); had done for all your life. On the following Tuesday morning you wake up and now bank with HSBC (say), and all of your direct debits, standing orders and other 3rd party agreements (credit cards etc) have all been seamlessly moved….That is effectively what was done.

It was not easy. It relied on the fact that i’d packed my family off on a camping holiday during this period so that i could work over the weekend without guilt, and also relied upon the support guys at my new hosts being around to answer some of my support calls during this time. It also relied on about a month’s worth of planning in advance to ensure things were in place to go through with it.

Would i do it again? No probably not. However it needed to be done, and i’m glad that its completed.

Now i can get on with other juicy internal IT projects that i’ve been putting off for too long

Today’s the day.

The day i’ve been planning (and dreading) for almost a month now, has finally arrived.

I get to pull the plug on HRMSACES and move it lock-stock across to a completely new hosting company. New server, new hosts and a new domain.

The idea of switching hosting companies came up in a conversation with an old fried at the UK Oracle User Group meeting in Birmingham last December.

I’d met up with an old DBA lag of mine, and whilst the free beer was flowing we discussed many pressing issues of the day (state of the contract market, temperature of the beer, Digital SLR’s, Web Hosting, Apple Mac’s etc). Web Hosting got me talking. At the time i was using 1and1 internet as my primary hosts (and registrar) for all of the domains i own, including the HRMSACES forum site. However i was (and still am at present) paying for a professional hosting package, which chimes in at £29 per month plus other sundries for the numerous additional domains held. This means i am paying, on average, over £70 per quarter.

Tim (the DBA) had almost choked on his beer at that (almost but not quite – a DBA defends his beer to the end and would rather miss an RMAN backup than see beer go to waste). Further discussions ensued, and the outcome was that i was being fleeced and should mosey over to an outfit called Fuzioned, who would kit me out for significantly less of my hard-earned ££££.

So that is what i did…Actually that wasn’t. What i did was procrastinate for about 3 months before finally approaching them.

Anyway – the rest is a ramble for another day. What we have happening today is the “big one”. Having already moved over my own company web sites and email (with zero downtime i hasten to add) today we embark on a journey to move the (reasonably) active HRMSACES foums.

I suspect it won’t be smooth, and will take more time than i have planned, but hopefully it should all be right in the end…