Wednesday night has become “server maintenance night” for my opengeofiction.net website hosting project. With more than 200 active users, there has to be a fixed time that is announced in advance for server updates, changes, tests and reboots. We have settled on 0400 Thursdays UTC, which comes down to 8 PM Alaska Daylight Time (next week that’ll be 7 PM Alaska Standard Time).
Last night what was hoped to be just a regular backup and reboot of the main server, and a “refresh” of the carto (map rendering i.e. map-picture-drawing) server turned into an all-night odyssey, as I struggled with a bizarre failure on the render server that pushed me to having to restore the whole server from the previous night’s automated backup. I still don’t know what went wrong – the render program refused to restart after the manual reboot which was part of the render server “refresh.” As is so often the case with these Linuxy-sysadmin problems, I suspect something went awry with file permissions.
Anyway, it was one of those proverbial IT adventures, and with my normally very fixed, habitual sleep times, I made and drank some coffee late in the night in order to be able to stay awake to do what needed to be done, which further messed up my sleep when I finally was able to go to sleep. So now I’m… messed up, sleepwise.
There’s a less personal and more upbeat mention of the event, posted to my other blog, here, which was also cross-posted to the “User Diaries” on the OpenGeofiction server, here.
