Nikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 24mm — ¹/400 sec, f/6.3, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
A Beautiful, Peacful Place
where I've been trying to imagine myself lately
( a deserted road near this place )

So, my web site was down for a few days. Sorry about that.

It doesn't happen often, but this time was a doozy. The ISP hosting my server went bankrupt, and by the time I found out, my server was sitting dead on the floor of a warehouse.

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/25 sec, f/2.5, ISO 6400 — map & image data — nearby photos
How I've Felt Lately
another of the wisdom kings at the Ushio Kannon Temple (牛尾観音)

I've got to say, though, I'm actually very thankful.

My web hosting has always been free, a kind, ongoing gift from a former coworker at Yahoo!. Even though we haven't talked for a decade, he's let my server sit in his business and occasionally burn up some of his support staff's time. I've never had to pay for bandwidth, or even think about bandwidth. For perhaps 15 years. I'm so very thankful.

I'm thankful that my brother Steve dropped everything to help me set up an empty virtual server at Amazon Web Services, where in this situation “help me” is used euphemistically to mean “did everything”. I looked into it as a backup a year ago, and the configuration was just too daunting for me to comprehend.

I'm thankful that I had a backup of my system, and that it was up to date. Crashplan doesn't officially support headless clients like I'd need on a remote server, but they tell how to do it and it works, and works well. I was able to restore 50+GB of stuff in about an hour. It seems that both Crashplan and Amazon have fast pipes.

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/400 sec, f/5.6, ISO 5600 — map & image data — nearby photos
My Cup Runnith Over
( please ignore that “my cup tippith over” is probably a more-appropriate caption for this photo )

After setting up my work environment on the new system, and restoring the bulk of things from backup, I then had to set everything up. This is a bit like collecting stuff from a tornado-ravaged house to set up shop at an empty cabin across the street. I had to relearn how to do all the system-administration tasks, moving as I did from Debian to Amazon. Amazon's yum package management system seems easy enough to work with ("YUM" stands for "Yet Uh-nutha' Manager"), and is nicely populated with packages, though it took me a while to figure out “yum list installed”.

I had to re-figure out how to configure the main pieces of my server solution (Apache, MySQL, wordpress) and get them to work together. After doing that, I had to do it all over when I had to bite the bullet and upgrade major versions of the software.

After that it was checking things and correcting the bazillion little things that needed to be re-installed from somewhere, reconfigured, or retwiddled. I'm sure as many more wait to be discovered.

Nikon D4 + Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 — ¹/400 sec, f/2.5, ISO 1800 — map & image data — nearby photos
Loose Ends
I'm sure there will be many
( at the Daichiji Temple (大池寺), Shiga Japan )

The worst part of the whole thing has been having to deal with email via a web page. I've used emacs to read email for over 30 years, and I'm used to it, but with my machine crashed, I had to revert to interfacing via a web page. Ugh.

In the end I think I've got almost everything back to normal, and in hindsight I'm amazed at how smoothly, relatively speaking, it all went.

One casualty of the move is my (now disabled) Online Image Metadata Viwer. It got a fantastic number of accesses each day, but most were scrapers using it, it seems, to try to access other sites anonymously. I went to great lengths to try to shut this kind of use down, but enough gets through that I just can't risk the bandwidth, now that I'm going to have to pay. I have no idea what kind of bandwidth I used to use, nor how much that would cost now. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

iPhone 6+ — ¹/1800 sec, f/2.2, ISO 32 — map & image data — nearby photos
Potato Boy
because potatos