At last, I am getting my COVID dividend. By which I mean, 3 months after my industry collapsed in a screaming insolvent heap, I get a day of leave. With any luck there will be a few more to come, as I have a heap due to me.
I have many ambitions for this one day, and at 4pm it looks like I will be achieving basically zero of them, except for a blog post. But I did log in to the “Elastic Beanstalk” server. I call it that because I had plans to use Elastic Beanstalk to host it, until I found out how much Elastic Beanstalk costs. Now it’s just a tiny EC2 running an Express server.
So I logged in and noticed that there were a lot of upgrades waiting for me to do. I have this issue at work as well, and I don’t do the upgrades because we don’t want one mysterious problem to take down the entire company. It’s a small risk, but it’s a real one. Due to some sort of AWS failure we were down for 22 hours once, and many customers got very antsy about that.
So I did the upgrades and rebooted the server. Then I ran some graphics software called The Gimp which logged me out and I lost all of my windows. And after the trauma of figuring out what was going on there, I forgot that I had ever touched that server.
But what I did not do was restart the server. Which meant that when users went to the front page of Extended Stats, the little box where you can search for your user name didn’t work. Ooh, bad look.
Luckily a new user emailed me to say that although I had told him that his account was ready, he could not find it.
That feature is about the only part of Extended Stats that can actually be down. It and the blog are the only servers. Everything else is serverless, and although it can happen that I can screw it up, it can’t be just not started. If extstats.drfriendless.com is ever down it’s either because I didn’t pay the bill or AWS os down. And if AWS is down, you won’t be worrying about my site because all hell will break loose.
Well, at least y’all know I’m alive. I’m going to go try to do some programming for a bit.
