Server Upgrades

[mjstrand]

We just went through a server upgrade for our primary web server at http://www.strandvision.com. Our previous server was on-line for over 5 years and it looks like the company went out of business (although the server ran perfectly). Since we were not able to get support tickets handled at all, we spent the week transitioning to the new one. One big thing that we discovered is that the software from 5 years ago (even though auto-updated) is very different from today's software. That caused lots of programming issues that needed to be solved. The other thing that I learned is that lots of people on the internet path do not follow the DNS cache rules, so even though it may say 5 minutes, it is meaningless. Fortunately we decided to take the entire month to make the move, so it was easy to keep both systems running concurrently until everyone moved over. Speaking to lots of IT people, it sounds like server swaps are always a major issue that always has a couple hiccups. I am glad that it is behind us now.