Customer issues cleared up (I hope)

January 22, 2009 D. H. McKee

Off

The lateness of this post is likely a little misleading. We finally got the server problems sorted out last week, and I took a 5 day mini-vacation in Montreal (actually 4 days, and I kind of screwed around on Tuesday). Apparently my MySQL-foo is pretty spot-on, and I was able to restore 10 jigabytes of data to to a backup server from our backup server. We’re now rebuilding the failed DB server, which looks more and more as if its LSI Logic RAID card simply reset at some point, causing a massive RAID failure. Luckily, we do nightly backups.
However, the version of mysqldump had a bug in it, whereby it exported the system database, information_schema, along with our own db. This system database can’t be imported, so the whole restore process kept failing. The only solution was to edit the db backup (which was, as I said, 10 jigabytes, making it impossible to open in a conventional editor), so we used a line editor to remove the first x lines of the backup. This worked, but it then took about 8-10 hours to re-import the data and only after upgrading the MySQL server and other required packages.
So, the server was offline for a total of 3 business days, and two of those days were spent trying to recover the server without destroying the data onboard. Turns out our time was better spent finding a new (if temporary) home for the data.
Montreal was fun.

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About This Site

As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

Writers often treat the bio like it’s an interview or something. Maybe like they’re having a conversation with you, the reader. While it may work sometimes, the most common way to write a bio is to write in the 3rd person.

I’m like those writers, and I’m talking to you directly, unlike the common way to do a bio. You should see my About page. It makes sense to me, since this is a bit which describes my blog’s website. When I get famous enough that I don’t have time to talk to you, I’ll have an intern write everything in 3rd person. Until then, you get to talk to me.

Like blogs of old, this one is a personal document of the comings and goings of me. Articles I’ve written, links I’ve posted, videos I liked, etc. Here, a first-person perspective is the way to go, at least for now. So, this is my site. I’m D. H. McKee, a sometimes artist, sometimes writer. Mostly just a guy on the internet.