SquidgeWorld Archive

Yes, if you tried to get onto the archive since Sunday morning, you'll notice we weren't up and running. The reasons were many.

First, the failing SSD. When we rebooted after a kernel upgrade on Sunday, the SSD failed to boot. It would just not recognize itself as a bootable device. So after doing lots of things, I performed a "cloning" process to clone the data from the old, failing SSD to a new one. And that went perfect - until it didn't. See, instead of cloning just that SSD, it actually overwrote the second SSD for some reason, and altered what's called the UUIDs of both devices. The UUID is a unique identifier for a device - and it became corrupted on the second drive, so much that even if I could boot up the first replacement, I couldn't do anything with the system because it barfed at duplicate UUIDs.

That led to reinstalling. But beyond that, because of a few factors, I updated the level of code that is current for OTW's AO3. And then there were issue because the old code relied on certain specific items like elasticsearch 6.8, certain Java code levels, and certain Ruby gem levels that weren't available anymore and/or were outdated. So my update failed until I pulled all new code.

We should have been up by Tuesday morning at the latest. However, I shot myself in the foot (figuratively) because I overwrote some configuration items that I shouldn't have. This resulted in very mixed results - sometimes the configuration would work, sometimes not. And so this morning, bless zz9pzza because he sat with me for almost 2 hours until we realized that the wound was self inflicted. Yes, we should have been up about 30 hours ago.

So that's over and done with.

At this time, two things. First, I'm going to update my guide to installing OTW's code that created SquidgeWorld to include a bunch of new data. Second, the code that we're running now is a year newer than it was when we went down on Sunday. Most stuff is behind he scenes, but your user ID is now in your profile, and we have the "75 tag limit per work" code in production now. So there you go.

EDIT: As soon as we were up this afternoon, things went pearshaped again with the database. I just redid everything, and ::knock wood:: let's see if it stays up.