Project
Projects are fun. You get to learn new things. You see things grow from nothing to something. All the little things you never think about are really important. Miss one and everything can fall.
I am in a project doing just that.
I got to be there from the start. I created the development virtual server so the developers could start building this totally new portal for a clients client.
At first not much happened just got a lot of dates for deadlines. That mainly, in my head, concerned the developers. Ack! How wrong I was…
Then came the planning of the test servers that are supposed to mirror the Production servers perfectly! Now how do I do that when I have nothing to go with?
Well, it started that I got the specs on what was needed. Disk space, RAM, CPUs, load and how big the database might grow.
Then I just created the test servers on VMware. Then we ordered the server for prod. Everything is virtualized in VMware on Prod too. Then we had to order a UPS and a Switch.
Tricky part started about now. What network should be in? We had to plan the entire network with subnets and what not. I can’t network at all and it seemed all very confusing and weird. Now we have a rainbow in our server-room because of all the colors of the network cables. Mind not to pull the wrong color or someone is going to be mad!
Now all that in place. Oh I need to learn how to install the portal? What I have to know how the database works? PostgreSQL? Yeah… piece of cake?
I spent about a week reading up on how to make backups of postgresql databases. Then I spent even more time trying to make it work IRL. On paper it all seemed so easy.
First you have to uncomment a lot of stuff in the conf file. Then you get to decide a lot of time intervals and finally you have to write a command that acctually does the backups for you. Oh and don’t forget to create the directory or that postgres user needs to be able to write to it… took me couple of days to realize that.
Ok, time to fix with production. Where you don’t have the portal and database on the same server. Weird errors in my logs! Well, apparently there is a different conf for connections that comes from outside the server that you have to edit. Yay now it works! Almost! The portal doesn’t like it’s permissions, but we gave permission to write in all the important folders? ooooh, you write a log in the /bin folder? WHY ON EARTH? Yeah, you can’t move it, wooops?!
Well, that are all the bigger stuff. Had a lot of bumbs on the way that had to be fixed. I have learned a lot and have a better view of how things look like in the start. Not like I’m used to coming in at the middle when everything is already up and running “smoothly”.
Now I just have to fix our UPS. Apparently, we need a legacy card since the firmware on our server doesn’t know how to talk serial at 9600, instead it talks at 2400. And no, it can’t be fixed with a row in config. We tried.
Just love new projects. Everything goes wrong for so long… Oh almost forgot… Our production APP server and DB server can’t talk to eachother! So, this is gonna be interesting getting all the database connections to work from the APP server. Whee…
