Deployment, Downtime

Reger.com was down for scheduled maintenance this evening. We're now running on Tomcat 5.5 and Java 5. The deployment wasn't perfect. We got started at 10PM and had the site back online at 10:45PM, as we had notified everybody throughout the day. But at 11PM the site was still slow for some reason. I was frustrated but undeterred.

By 11:30PM I found that my server.xml file wasn't porting properly from 5.0.28 to 5.5. I had to recreate that file. Soon reger.com sites were running quickly again. Next I got joereger.com up and running.

After that I had to deploy the half dozen supporting applications that also rely on Tomcat.

Some new features in this build. A yellow fade at the top of the admin screen that looked cool when I added it but now looks like crap. And simplified tabs... I tucked Episodes and Time Periods under the Entries tab... less is more when it comes to usability... no need to confuse people. People will see time periods and episodes at the bottom of the screen each time they create an entry.

Things seem to be running smoothly right now. Knock on wood. I always like to deploy new pieces on Fridays so that I have the weekend to catch up with any issues.

One issue that's been ongoing is with the test instance that we have set up for the group in Toronto working on templates. It keeps losing the site template. I have no idea why, but it's been driving me nuts over the last week or so.

Let me know if you see anything out of order.

I'm tired. These production builds are draining. I spent all day creating a list of tasks. Running through them in my mind. Testing them all on a development box. Tweaking. Retesting. All in all the processes I have in place for building the app, deploying it, testing it, etc are quite good.

Off to bed... with the cell phone and automated "Site Down" monitor on the bed stand... as always.