Jun
6
Back On Air
June 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment
Well, as usual, I have been really slack about blogging here so it is high time to bring things up to date.
First off, I am now back at home having finished my contract in France in early May so I am back on the job market. Things are pretty slow right now which gives me time to do fun things like my accounts, gardening, rebuilding computers etc.
Unfortunately, a few days ago, the hard drive of my web server completely crashed as did the mother board so I have had to replace both components. I have ordered a Jetway NC92 Dual-Core Atom Mini-ITX motherboard along with a new SATA 2.5″ Hard Drive from Logic Supply so that I can rebuild my web-server. I am a little disappointed that the previous hard drive only lasted a year before failing and even more disappointed that the mother board, a VIA VB7001 failed on me. I have no idea why. I will probably use this system as a backup web server when it arrives and perhaps as a backup data server as well. I will have to find another use for it as well, so I am thinking about using it to run Sharepoint Server or something similar.
To fill the breach left by this failure, I have reconfigured my development Mini-ITX box which has 2GB of RAM as a Web Server running Windows 2008 and IIS 7, neither of which I have experience with.
It took me a while to get my ASP.NET web sites up and running, but in the end everything panned out. The biggest problem was that my web.config was referring to .NET Framwork 3.5 which I had not yet installed on the server and that caused a lot of trouble until I realised what was wrong. However, Ordersofbattle.com is now back in business.
That leaves the PHP sites that use Wordpress, it took me a little while to configure PHP 5.2 to use IIS 7 but things went pretty well and now this fine blog is now back in business!
All that is left now is my Orders of Battle Web Log which also uses Word Press and my ASREP site which collects Adsense stats.
On the Wordpress front, I hope to ugrade to the latest version soon.
One reason that I was able to use my development box as the new web server is that I took the opportunity of being home to buy a new laptop which double as my development machine fron now on. I liked my wife’s Fujitsu T5010 convertible laptop that I bought almost the same model for myself. The only difference is that I went with 4GB RAM instead of 3GB. It arrived a few days ago and I am very happy with it. The keyboard and screen are first rate and the handwriting recognition is very good, far better than my old Fujitsu P1510. Since it arrived, I have been very busy setting all my applications up on it and copying my data across to it.
Needless to say, all this effort has rather distracted from my ongoing program of rewriting the .NET Application for ordersofbattle.com and its associated windows applications so that they are database independent and use LINQ for Entities. This is still ongoing and is turning into a complete rewrite of both the data and middle tiers. However, things are going well and I hope to have all the classes rewritten soon. This will allow me to retire over a hundred stored procedures.
