I worked on the migration of a cPanel server almost every working moment from February 27 to March 6. This was an effort to give my Weblog Improvement clients a better, more stable hosting environment.
The first stage of the migration was intended to be the only stage, but the server that I migrated the clients to started having primary hard drive problems almost immediately. That eventually necessitated a complete re-migration of the same clients on the weekend of March 3 to 4. The dust didn’t start to settle until March 5 or 6.
I was really fortunate to be were working with a hosting provider with as many resources as ServerBeach. When the first server I got from them started developing problems, they gave me a second server almost immediately. This gave me the opportunity to get the migration started during the weekend and minimize the amount of misdelivered and delayed email.
From there, I had to jump almost immediately into the Time Zone change from Hell. I want to write an article about all the problems I stumbled onto in Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core, Windows 2000, TiVo, and the PalmOS, but I’m not sure when I’ll have time. I guess the bottom line is that I’m shocked at:
- How poorly most of these operating systems designed their time zone change mechanisms considering that time zone changes are determined by governmental organizations that are subject to politics.
- How little operating system designers learned from the U.S. government reactions to the oil crises of the 1970s. If they had remembered the way that Congress futzed with the time zones back then, they could have designed a patch mechanism that could have affected the tables that drive time zone changes.
After I got done with that, I was so shell shocked from burning the midnight oil that I wanted to stay quiet for a few days.