Speedy Server

So far, it seems the changes I made are working – a few people I talked with said the site’s loading quicker and without generating any errors.  It’s nice to hear – while I did start fixing it at around 11pm last night after playing Halo 3 online, I didn’t stop until around 5am when I finally got the XHTML 1.0 Transitional check to pass, and I’m glad that work paid off.

What I haven’t mentioned here yet is I also did some background work on the server itself.  It’s been emailing me for a while now saying it’s not happy, and initially it was just that and nothing else.  Later on it started partially dropping off the web for 5 or 10 minutes and then would return.  I say partially as things like web pages wouldn’t open from it (you couldn’t read this blog, for example) but other items kept working, such as email.

For that one, I started around 8pm Friday night and wrapped up around 4am.  After a few hours of digging, I pinned it down to two issues.  First, up2date (a program that updates some of the software running on here) wasn’t reaching a valid update server, and second, the website managing software that runs on here also wasn’t reaching update servers.  The second one was easy – I had an entry in the hosts file that aimed the update process at a specific server, and that server isn’t around anymore.  I took that out and it started working just fine.

The first one, however, wasn’t as easy for me to fix, given that up2date is aimed at an update server at The Planet, the company that I have this server at.  I opened a trouble ticket explaining that up2date was aimed at a specific server that was responding to pings (a.k.a. it was booted up and listening) but was returning “Internal Server Error” to my update requests.  About an hour later they had it reconfigured with updated settings and things were working properly (Yay! Thanks The Planet ).  I spent the next few hours getting everything updated and I also adjusted the firewall’s settings a little.

All in all, I think we’re looking good, and it seems those I talked with agree.  But do me a favor – knock on wood for me and hope we’ll be problem free for a while.  I can’t keep staying up past 3am every night.