As mentioned in the previous post, the old Extended Stats server blew a foofoo valve and needs parts. The fan I ordered on EBay arrived and when I went to install it I discovered that I’d ordered the wrong size. This is one reason I hate hardware. Although I love the details of software, the details of hardware bore me senseless. Why can’t they just make it out of Lego so I can hack something together rather than having to figure out exactly what thing I want?
Anyway, I ordered another fan and it didn’t arrive yet. In the mean time the idea of doing a lift and shift continued to grow in my mind. A “lift and shift” in cloud computing is when you take an existing service and dump it in the cloud without adapting it to cloud architecture at all. It’s kind of the worst, most expensive, way to get into the cloud, but it’s also the quickest.
Another of the things I use the site for (other than being there for you guys) is experimenting with stuff. There’s a type of database that I’d like to try at work, which would be a huge risk for the company, but I can muck with Extended Stats for a few hours without anyone losing too much money. I mentioned the idea of experimenting on the stats site to my boss, and I suspect I might be able to get him to throw me some funding… so yeah, that’s gonna happen.
So as you might guess I did the lift and shift. It took a few hours, spread over two weekends, as as usual everything in Django seems to have changed between releases. And then I had an annoying problem where the web server couldn’t find the code, even though everything was configured perfectly, and that took me a good 3 hours to figure out – my home directory had permissions which prevented the web server from seeing the code! Late last night I got that sorted, and the new site started to work.
Then this morning I spent another hour or so getting the downloader to work. And then, in a small brain explosion, I told git (the version control system) to undo all of my changes… so then I had to go and fix all the things again, which was not at all what I had planned.
But now it seems that http://stats3.drfriendless.com is working OK. You might notice that there’s an S missing from HTTP. That’s another problem for me to sort out! I’ve come to realise that I don’t particularly enjoy solving AWS configuration problems, so I’m not really looking forward to that one. I could do it with a load balancer (which is expensive) or with a CloudFront CDN (which is annoying to configure but I suspect I’m getting OK at it by now). Or I could try to do SSL termination in Apache – actually, nah, that’s the sort of thing that will just make more work for me later.
Well, that’s how I spend my weekends! I’ve been hearing cries from the crowd asking for utilisation numbers on the new site, and I have no idea why I haven’t done them yet. So I might try to do some programming and get those happening. I like programming, it’s better than configuring web sites.
