Kyle M. Perkins

Today had to be one of the shortest working days I ever had. Before I get into the day's activities, I received an email from the support guy yesterday (Monday) at 1pm saying that the missing databases were up, and he could move the subdomains for me. I sent him a list of the subdomains I needed moved (send around 1:30pm). I also found out that accessing PHPMyAdmin was tedious (see previous post), and sent another email around 8:30pm. On to Tuesday:

Everytime my alarm went off (at 9am, 9:30, and 10), I checked outside to see if the "Inspector People" were here yet. Luckily, they weren't. I got out of bed around 10:30, got dressed, unloaded/loaded the dishwasher, did some last minute cleaning, put the cats in the bedroom (with litter, food, water, and scratchers), and left the apartment just before 11 to get Keat to class. After dropping her off, I arrived at the office at 11:45 and booted up. The server transfer was supposed to be completed Monday night/Tuesday morning, so I wanted to check on it. Well, it wasn't exactly finished. A few of the sites weren't even transfered! I received this email at 12:15pm today:

It seems like all the sub domains are redirected to one of the sub net of shadowdev.com. I think you can log on the control panel and add them. Most of them don't have any content. you know where they redirects to. It will be easier that you add and set them up on the httpd.conf file which locates at /var/www/vhosts/shadowdev.com/conf

..and this about the PHPMyAdmin access:

I am not sure if you can access to phpMyAdmin in the other way. That is how i usually do which i have to log on the control panel and do it.

I sent in a response saying that I actually completed the subdomain transfer (which took about an hour), and asked about the shadowdev.com transfer (send at 1pm). Also, I checked the other domains to see if they were transfered, and found out that only 5-6 were transfered and the rest were not. I asked support about what was going on (at 1:15pm). This was the first time I was a little suspicious about my support guy's education and training. I mean, not to stereotype anybody, but when the support email says:

Hello,
 
Thank you for your email.
 
The reason i did not switch them because there are so many sub domains attaching with a couple of domains. I just switch them all to the new server now. There might be a few setting which are not configured properly (old configuration). Let us know if you need root password so you can easily configure the php files. This the full path where each domain locating: /var/www/vhosts/ This is where the website content locates: /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs

...you know there has to be something up. My webhosting company hasn't really been the best webhosting company in the world, especially with some of the previous support requests I sent in the past. However, this is the only company that gave me a good price for the services I needed. Other companies were either lacking in equipment, software, or too-high price.

Anyway, I finally found out that the shadowdev.com domain was transfered (or so I hoped), and I downloaded the PHPMyAdmin software to its own subdirectory on the server. After loading the setup domain and fixing a few requirement files, I had quick and easy access to PHPMyAdmin, just like the old server. It's not exactly the same, but it's better than the 5-step process. You think that the support guys would know that. Oh well.

I left the office around 2:15 to pick up Keat, we quickly picked up some gas and food, and went home. It turns out that the "Inspector" guy had been there, and left a little 1" strip on the counter saying "Maintenance was in your apartment today performing the semi-annual safety inspection. Thank you for your cooperation." I guess we passed.(?)

We let the kitties out and about, and they love the clean(er) apartment. Keat and I actually sat down and watched Date Night (which was good; 8/10 overall). Afterwards, I worked on fixing server migration issues and found out that either the hosting company's servers were getting confused, or the worldwide DNS servers were getting mixed records, because wheverI would go to a site (for example: shadowdev.com), it would either load the old server or the new server (the sites on the new server have "New Server" comments at the top of the main index page so I could tell the difference, but end-users couldn't tell). It got really confusing when I had to upload or edit certain files to fix specific errors (hence: the "finalization" process).

Keat took a small nap while I did that, and then I cooked dinner. Afterwards, she woke up and we caught up on some of our Hulu episodes while eating, and by the time we realized it, Tuesday was over and December was here.

On the lighter side, I found out that Yanni (my favorite New Age artist) is releasing his first instrumental album since 2003, and it comes out in February. Maybe early Birthday present for myself? That'd be nice.

Along with the server location confusion, the top-level domains (like shadowdev.com) point to the new server, while subdomains (like dev.shadowdev.com and kp.shadowdev.com) point to the old server. I'm not an expert on server setups, but that gets really confusing, especially since the DNS records were never manually modified for remote subdomain locations. I'm posting this entry on both servers so both have the most updated records no matter what the DNS/cache servers say.