Bewildering Stories Editorial

by Jerry Wright

Death By Server

Well this has been one of the more frustrating weeks in the life of Bewildering Stories. Y'see, everything was all set up for a simple transfer of Bewildering Stories from its home in Kelowna, BC to another faster server in the same server farm. Everything had been tested, all the stuff worked, it was just great. And could be accessed by going to www3.bewilderingstories.com.

So... Simple, right? Just move the IP address (209.97.221.11 for those who care...) from the old machine to the new machine. Simple. Yeah right. I don't know what the techs did, but the moment they moved the address, both machines became unreachable. (Probably they forgot to remove the address from the old box. I couldn't get into it, so I couldn't see.)

So round and round we went, firing an exchange of e-mail back and forth, and of course, I was in Sacramento doing a seminar, and studying hard and trying to bring BwS back up! Arrgh. Finally, I got them to set the addresses correctly, but they obviously did SOMETHING ELSE at same time, because now the Apache server was no longer serving pages correctly. All our nice menus (running as SSIs (server side includes)) no longer showed up.

They had been planning to shut the old server down, and I told them: "No! No! Leave it up!" and I transferred the DNS settings over to the old server. Only NOW, Apache started serving up a very interesting Bluegrass Music Page. Bewildering, sure. But not Bewildering Stories. So I flailed around inside the internal workings of the Server, found and fixed the problem, and voila! Here we are. Except. We are still on the old server and we HAVE to move. It is running an old version of Fedora (Core 2) and there are some things that I want to do that require Core 4. Only the Core 4 Server won't let me do Includes, so no menus.

It's the engineer's version of Hell, where everything is designed perfectly, follows specifications exactly, and nothing works.

Any Apache gurus out there? I need help.