One way or another my blog has been broken to some degree for a couple of months. It’s not the blog’s fault – the ground was changed underneath its feet, and the building it lives in was reconstructed, altering all of the door and window locations. (Metaphorically speaking, of course…)

More than half of my sites had been running on a CentOS 5 VPS for almost 20 years. (ChatGPT described the system as “museum grade obsolete” – which was “a little” too close to true.) In the middle of April I undertook moving everything from that server to a much newer environment. When I started, I had the “extremely” optimistic expectation it would take a day or two to make the swap. Reality, however, had other plans. After a grueling 3 weeks of working days, nights, weekends and most of everything between, I’d finally gotten all of the functionality moved and the migration complete late in the afternoon of May 6. I notified the the hosting service they could shut down the old VPS, which I strongly suspect was the one remaining instance of CentOS 5 they had been needing to keep running.

There were some hiccups in moving this site and my blog, but it was working happily on the new server – accessible using HTTP only: I hadn’t set up SSL certs and all in moving any of the sites from the old VPS to the new one, everything was carried over as-is.

Being able to change my sites from HTTP to HTTPS was one of the big reasons for moving to a newer operating system, and changing all of my sites to HTTPS was done in just a few days. It almost seemed too easy …

Meanwhile, the laptop I’ve been doing most of my work on, where I’ve got just about everything installed and properly configured, started being more and more unreliable. The BSOD rate started climbing from where it had been 2-5 weeks between crashes – and when I’d had three bluescreens in two days, I had to stop to deal with the problem. I replaced the graphics drivers. That helped – or did it? I replaced the disk drivers. That seemed to make more of a difference – for a short time. I’d at least been able to get a little work done in those two weeks – but then another BSOD stopped me again – and hours later, I ended up disabling everything that might launch DeFrag.exe. winDoze started behaving properly until I used NoScript to disable Amazon’s JavaScript (20% CPU) in one Firefox tab, then went to refresh another Amazon tab (so it would know JS had been stopped.) As the screen went dark before turning the all-too-familiar shade of blue, I thought to myself “I shouldn’t have just done that right then …” At least I knew where that problem came from.

As if I didn’t have enough to keep me busy, I needed to install PHP-FPM on the new server so I could simultaneously have the current version of PHP available for new software, and the “older” version needed by a large part of the massive PHP code base I’ve built up over the past few decades. Getting the extension working “properly” had been a required part of the migration that I had done on May 6, so I should be all set, right? Wait, what does “Primary script unknown” mean in the error log? What primary script? … and when there’s an error saying “Undefined variable: ... in ... on line 74” how did that happen – who called that script, what parameters were passed in the original request? I ended up spending a week and a half exploring the PHP-FPM source code and building a new version of the package on my server that has reasonable error reporting that is now a diagnostic tool rather than noise – but another big chunk of time had gone by.

I was wrapping up something else when I happened to pass by my blog here and discovered it had pretty much become completely broken. A few other fairly serious problems had also come up on the rest of the site. I’ve become quite anxious to get back to being focused on the higher priority work I’ve got “on the stove,” but investing “a little” time to get my “Internet Home” into order seemed like a good idea. It’s now about 26 hours of wall clock time later, but I’ve now gotten to where I can say “wfredk.com and its blog are now presentable enough that I can leave further work until ‘later’” and I can close the book on this chapter.

The patient is being discharged from the hospital and can go home to return to normal life.