[Alex Pepple]

Those of you who tried must have noticed that the Sphere was down since late last night until just a few minutes from now (~4:30 PM PST). Well, I've been in an epic struggle with the manual migration to the new server because nothing that was supposed to work was working: the database was very large, but that alone shouldn't have been a problem, except that the system kept throwing database errors at the data in the new environment, and the automatic data migration was broken just because it didn't like some of the Sphere data, and I was stuck with figuring out how to do it manually, etc. etc. Suffice it to say, it was touch and go there for a long time to the point where I thought I might have to restore the site from a very old backup several years old (because that was the only backup that the new server didn't throw errors at). But, I think we're over the hump now, and things should keep getting better from here. I'm not sure if everything is back to normal, though, because the site had been behaving oddly as far as logging in and staying logged in goes. So, go and ahead and brave your way in, and hopefully, the down times from here on will be at the minimum.

And I should mention some good news in parting, that I did successfully manage to transfer over everything with absolutely no data loss. So, you should see everything that you entered up until when I brought down the server last night for this rather hairy migration task!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Janice D. Soderling]

You are brilliant.

We are grateful.

[Michael Cantor]

Thanks once again for all your hard work, Alex.

[Woody Long]

Alex —

Yes. Many many thanks.

— Woody

[Andrew Frisardi]

Thanks a lot, Alex!

[Alex Pepple]

Thanks and much appreciated, Janice, Michael, Woody, Andrew!

And now, I'm happy to report that I'm less and less worried about the odd behavior of the website I'd noticed after it initially came back up because everything seems to be functioning as expected now. So, that initial hiccup was probably from the big site database and other functions still loading after startup and not quite leveling yet. Still, be sure to post here to report any glitches you might notice.

I should also add that the site should load/run quite faster now given the enhanced resource of the new server I've just migrated everything to. Maybe, you'll all notice it ... and do let me know!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Ann Drysdale]

Now and again, during the downliness, I tried to log in to see if the site was back up. Once I thought it was, because I got a perfect home page - that told me, top right, that I had last visited in February 2011. Then it disappeared again. I was afraid for you.

Now I wake to the good news in your last paragraph. Oh, well done, Alex- and thank you.

[Brian Allgar]

Thank you, Alex. Or should I call you 'Sisyphus'?

[Catherine Chandler]

All seems fine right now. Thank you, Alex!

[E. Shaun Russell]

Just chiming in with more thanks to Alex.

And I love Brian's Sisyphus reference, given that it's the Sphere we're talking about.