On the home-front, between finishing the move and unpacking, being down with the flu for a week, cleaning up the old townhouse, and offloading a gun safe and cast iron cookstove the previous owner left behind — I’ve not had a lot of spare time this week.
At work I’ve been trying to drive a transition to cloud-based services versus a server-room full of antique servers and busted thirty year old AC units… Which went from ‘easy with a bit of figuring out’ to ‘unbelievably complicated’ because other departments got involved.
So, while the other departments fret and worry about the unbridled horror that is change, I started moving the external-facing web servers to hosted solutions.
The main company website is just a WordPress site, so migration to another WordPress install isn’t exactly rocket surgery. And I got this done and operational on a test environment Wednesday.
Of course there’s more to this than just moving some data; the world needs to know where to find that data and the DNS for the domain is complicated; Google Workspace integration, Zoho MX record tomfoolery, and an entire class-C address space full of can’t be down for any time at all or it’s curtains for the free world services.
But, because the new host is out of my control and may do network things at random without asking for my input, I decided it was best to let them handle the DNS because they can adjust it to compensate automatically… So I did all of the configuration and whatnot, and then waited until after hours on Friday — when traffic is historically the lowest — and switched the DNS at the domain level.
And at about midnight last night the global DNS settled out and things transitioned…
Of course that’s when I discover that a bunch of stuff in the website we paid some marketing company to half-ass was all statically linked to some CDN somewhere — so for the next hour I was running mysql queries to iron out the link bugs.
Then there was the problem where the contact form marketing insists on having in the footer of every page was freaking out at the varnish cache and melting down the server from Ajax calls to refresh the form content… So I re-wrote the form handler to not worry about the cache because I don’t use Google Captcha and don’t need to do weird post tricks to appease the mighty “G”…
Then the PDF poster they were using on the site got mad because the PDF data and the display plugin that was displaying it were now from different servers, which caused a browser error — so now the site is just displaying PDFs as a page versus an fancy dialog box.
In the end at about noon today I not only had the site running 100%, but performance-wise it’s testing better than it ever has.
I probably should have just re-written that marketing company abomination years ago…