roncli.com blog: Successor to the Understudy

It all started Wednesday night, when I finished the new Six Minutes To Release raid page. All was going well until I actually ran the page on the live server. For some reason, every $.ajax() call was requiring the browser to do some kind of authentication. This is not what I wanted, so I decided to run a test app to see if I could pinpoint where the problem occurs.

I wrote a test app in .Net 4.0, but I didn't have .Net 4.0 registered in IIS on Understudy. I registered it, but had no ASP.Net tab in IIS. Weird. Then I tried opening IE to run some Windows updates, but it wouldn't oblige, shutting down as soon as I started it. One thing led to another, and another, and another. After reverting to IE7, somehow breaking Windows Update, not being able to access the CD-ROM drive in the machine, getting the Administrator account reverted to a temporary profile, running System File Checker to no avail, and having ASP.Net 4.0 fail on me once I got it installed anyway, I gave it. It had become clear that, while the machine was still running SQL Server and IIS okay, the situation was unsalvageable.

So, this weekend I have decided to decommission Understudy as a server and move everything over to Successor. Successor is my new domain controller for the new network I've been running. It already has SQL Server 2008 installed. I've already transfered a number of non-production databases over to that server, and even tested a live one by moving Outpost Music's database to the new server. All's working well so far.

I still need to transfer all the websites, including the VSS database that I absolutely need to get rid of at some point. I've been thinking of installing Team Foundation Server instead of SVN, and this would be a fantastic opportunity to try it out.

So, lots of work ahead of me. Hopefully it'll be smooth and painless, unlike working with Understudy.

Labels: Servers

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