New server, broken links, travel plans

A hard drive failure a few days ago has forced a server migration on me a little sooner than I had planned. Since the problems in June I’ve wanted to accelerate my plans to move to different hardware, but it’s difficult because I am in Spain and the hardware is in Australia. On Thursday night the server stopped responding and wouldn’t reboot, so since then I’ve been doing my best to migrate things to a new server in the USA.

Unfortunately, the incident could not have come at a worse time. The server went down only a few hours after I announced a new version of Synergy, provisioning the new server was delayed because of time zone differences, contracts and international faxes flowing back and forth, the new server runs Linux and the old one ran FreeBSD and all the software is different so the migration has been very difficult. Furthermore, in about 5 hours from now I am off to the airport to fly to Australia; the journey itself will last about 30 hours.

So as an end user, what does this mean for you? Firstly, that there are still a lot of broken links on the site; secondly, that some areas are not yet migrated to the new machine (for example, the forums do not yet work); thirdly, that many of the automated systems are down (so I have to process payments manually). On the bright side, you should also notice that the site is much, much quicker, but for at least the next few days it will still be in transition mode. Thanks for your understanding and patience, and please accept my apologies for the inconvenience. I’ll be writing more about this as soon as I can.