{"id":2760,"date":"2016-12-16T23:36:30","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T14:36:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2016-12-16\/2760"},"modified":"2016-12-16T23:36:30","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T14:36:30","slug":"reports-of-my-demise-have-been-greatly-exaggerated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/2016-12-16\/2760","title":{"rendered":"Reports of My Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Nikkor 24-70mm f\/2.8 @ 24mm — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>400 sec, f<\/span>\/6.3, ISO 6400 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nA Beautiful,<\/span> Peacful Place<\/span>\nwhere I've been trying to imagine myself lately\n( a deserted<\/span> road near this place<\/a> )<\/small>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n

So, my web site was down for a few days. Sorry about that.<\/p>\n\n

It doesn't happen often, but this time was a doozy.<\/span> The ISP hosting<\/span> my\nserver went bankrupt, and by the time I found<\/span> out, my server was sitting\ndead on the floor of a warehouse.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>25 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 6400 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nHow I've Felt Lately<\/span>\nanother of the wisdom kings<\/a> at the Ushio Kannon Temple (\u725b\u5c3e\u89b3\u97f3)<\/span>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n

I've got to say, though, I'm actually very thankful.<\/p>\n\n

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

I'm thankful that my brother Steve<\/a>\ndropped everything to help me set up an empty\nvirtual<\/span> server at Amazon Web\nServices<\/a>, where in this situation “<\/span>help\nme”<\/span> is used euphemistically to mean “<\/span>did everything”<\/span>.\nI looked<\/span> into it as a\nbackup<\/span> a year<\/span> ago, and the configuration\nwas just too daunting for me to comprehend.<\/p>\n\n

I'm thankful that I had a backup of my system, and that it was up to\ndate. Crashplan<\/a> doesn't officially\nsupport headless clients like I'd need on a\nremote<\/span> server, but they tell how to do it and it works, and works\nwell. I was able<\/span> to restore 50+GB of stuff in\nabout an hour. It seems<\/span> that both Crashplan and\nAmazon have fast pipes.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>400 sec, f<\/span>\/5.6, ISO 5600 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nMy Cup Runnith Over<\/span>\n( please ignore that “<\/span>my cup tippith over”<\/span> is probably a more<\/span>-appropriate caption for this photo )<\/small>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n

After setting up my work environment on the new system, and restoring\nthe bulk of things from backup, I then had<\/span> to set\neverything up. This is a bit<\/span> like collecting\nstuff from a tornado<\/span>-ravaged house to set up shop\nat an empty cabin across the street. I had<\/span> to\nrelearn how to do all the system-administration tasks, moving as I did<\/span> from Debian to Amazon. Amazon's yum<\/i>\npackage management system seems easy enough to work with (\"YUM\" stands for\n\"Yet Uh-nutha' Manager\"), and is nicely populated with packages, though it\ntook me a while<\/span> to figure out “<\/span>yum list installed<\/i>”<\/span>. <\/p>\n\n

I had to re-figure out how to configure the main pieces of my server solution (Apache, MySQL, wordpress) and get them to work\ntogether. After doing that, I had to<\/span> do it all over when I had<\/span> to bite the\nbullet and upgrade major versions of the software.<\/p>\n\n

After that it was checking things and correcting the bazillion little\nthings that needed to be re-installed from somewhere, reconfigured, or\nretwiddled. I'm sure as<\/span> many more wait to be discovered.<\/p>\n\n

<\/a>\nNikon D4 + Voigtl\u00e4nder 125mm f\/2.5 — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>400 sec, f<\/span>\/2.5, ISO 1800 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nLoose Ends<\/span>\nI'm sure there will be many\n( at the Daichiji Temple (\u5927\u6c60\u5bfa),<\/span> Shiga Japan )<\/small>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The worst part of the whole thing has been having to deal with email via\na web<\/span> page. I've used emacs to read email for\nover 30 years, and I'm used to it, but with my machine crashed, I had to<\/span> revert to interfacing via a\nweb<\/span> page. Ugh.<\/p>\n\n

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

One casualty of the move is my (now disabled) Online\nImage Metadata Viwer<\/a>. It got a<\/span> fantastic number of accesses each day,\nbut most were scrapers using it, it seems, to try to access other sites\nanonymously. I went to<\/span> great lengths to try to shut this kind of use down,\nbut enough gets through that I just<\/span> can't risk the bandwidth, now that I'm\ngoing to have to pay. I have no<\/span> idea what kind of bandwidth I used<\/span> to use,\nnor how much that would cost now. I guess<\/span> I'll find out soon enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

<\/a>\niPhone 6+ — 1<\/sup>\/<\/big>1800 sec, f<\/span>\/2.2, ISO 32 —\nmap & image data<\/a> — nearby photos<\/a><\/span>\nPotato Boy<\/span>\nbecause potatos\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, my web site was down for a few days. Sorry about that.<\/p>

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.<\/p>

I've got to say, though, I'm actually very thankful.<\/p>

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. [...]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/regex.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}