Sorry about the problems with the site earlier this week. I have had a biblical plague of IT related misfortunes over the past few days. First, my new super-duper 40mbps line started dropping out regularly, usually with a page of unsaved data. After numerous calls and email, the BT engineer finally called to sort it out and also relocate my router where it should have been, i.e. not in the cupboard with the greatest source of interference and heat at the far end of the flat! After this was done, I then realised that I needed to extend all my Ethernet cables to reach the new location. Doh! Of course, the new router meant a new network set up. Networking Win 7 and XP machines has always seemed a dark art to me and with a randomness only equalled by Bistro Maths (qv Douglas Adams Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series). As usual, the experience created a sense of frustration that can really only be relieved by loosing off rounds from a high-powered weapon, strangling a civil servant or doing something very irresponsible with a ludicrously powerful vehicle. At lunchtime the next day a second engineer came, who deduced that the first guy had used an industrial powered cable tacker which crushed the wires and created a short. After two days of BT engineers rooting around under my desk and no internet, normal seemed to be restored.
Meanwhile, the techies looking after my virtual private server appeared to have set up back-ups to save to my server, which has limited space, not to my unlimited ftp storage. The result was a completely full disk and a total outage when the last of the space was consumed. Not only that, it looked my out of admin so I couldn’t even delete files to restore space. Consequently, I was at the mercy of their email support system to regain access. Just to add cream on the cake, the ‘database connection string’ became corrupted so users could not access my site. I had no idea it was connected with string but somehow it seems appropriate. Connecting with string is what it’s all about 🙂 Apparently,according to the great oracle Google, a ‘connection string’ is what tells the software where to look for the database. I have learnt that much anyway. Hopefully, everything is sorted out now and will remain so.