I'm about to say something blasphemous. It's a deep dark secret that I am about to share with the world.
Sometimes I absolutely HATE computers.
This statement is blasphemous because I am first and foremost a computer geek, and secondly, I make my living off the fuckers.
Of late, my contempt and frustration is leveled at my HBI server.
If it isn't old, out of date hardware giving me grief, it's old, out of date software aggravating the shit out of me.
I've had more than one person tell me I should port the entire thing to new hardware AND software.
Unfortunately, both cost time and money. However, the time and money I am spending on keeping this thing limping along is probably costing me more in the long run.
In December of last year, my ISP at the time decided to default on paying the bills to Bell, because of a dispute. Bell being much bigger, squashed them like a bug. Pulled the plug without warning.
And left me scrambling to find a new home for my server. My current ISP took me in on short notice and at a reasonable price. Since then, (perhaps it was the move, perhaps it was the sudden power outages, who knows?), it's been a litany of problems.
Disk failures, random hanging, you name it. Each time I thought I had it fixed, another problem would crop up, like that horrible gopher-head game.
This week it was my web server throwing "500 internal" errors, and recalcitrant mail cgi scripts for the forward-to-a-friend links. They just stopped working at some point.
It never fucking ends.
And people wonder why I don't have time to get to the membership applications.
Of course, with the mail scripts, it could be any number of things. For example, it might be that because I don't have "domainkeys" authentication on my outbound mails that Yahoo is rejecting them.
Like I said, it never fucking ends.
The problem with me debugging the scripts, is that they are ANCIENT, and
I don't write code all that much anymore. My "programming" editor of
choice these days varies between Visio and MS Word. That's the problem
when you have that frontal lobotomy and move into management... you lose
your programming skills. You have to do this sort of stuff every day to
stay sharp. I used to be a wizard at Fortran (yeah, I'm dating myself),
C, and Perl, but these days, when it comes to to programming, I feel
about as sharp as a butter knife. One that's been dragged on concrete.
So if I port the system to an entirely new server, then I still have to worry about hosting costs.
The site costs $106.95/month in hosting fees to have my lowly little mid-tower server co-located at a decent facility.
That is the least expensive service I could find after my last ISP bit the big one.
The cost of supporting credit-card transactions is $60/month.
I've been looking at finding cheaper hosting solutions since the site
doesn't bring in all that much money. (Hell, a PAPER ROUTE would bring in more money). But then, it IS a labour of love,
or insanity... not sure which takes precedence. But I have had no less
than 4 ISPs that provided Virtual Private Server hosting
in the past (some of them very big
names at the time), and they all, without a doubt, completely and
unequivocably SUCKED.
It costs me more, but with my own server, I can do what I want - I can debug down to the registry level.
I have CONTROL. Total Control. (In so far as the server gremlins will let me).
And we all know it's about Being In Total Control, Honey!
I think what pisses me off the most about this system isn't the
problems, it's the ones that I can't solve. I simply HATE it when a
machine gets the better of me. I have threatened to feed surly 8mm tape
drives a peanut butter sandwich. I have gone to work on 2 hours sleep
because I have been debugging a cgi script. I have gone without sleep
for 48 hours during a marathon upgrade, just to make sure every last
piece works when I flip the switch. I have forgotten about more bugs than most programmers have found.
Which means, I won't stop until I get this sucker working properly again. It's a matter of geek pride.
So I write this as I wait for a "queue flushing" application to work on
my mail server and see if it can't clean up the mess that is clogging
and slowing down mail transactions. The HBI mail server software is one
of those "open source" things, which means, "you get what you pay for" -
you get a million configuration files, arcane documentation with a
critical lack of examples, written by someone for whom English is a
distant 5th language, and an application that needs a voodoo
incantation, some quantity of virgin's blood, and the wing of a bat, in
order to work properly. Oh, and you'd better be standing on your left
foot, on a Tuesday during a full moon when you start it up. (Then again,
those antics aren't just reserved for Open Source software. Try to
install any over-priced Microsmurf server application and it isn't any better...)
Suffice it to say, that this kind of hassle is endemic to computer
systems, regardless of cost. The more complex they are, the more work
they are to maintain. Why do you think they have a newsgroup called
"alt.sysadmin.recovery"? Because the job will make you crazy at some
point - even if you aren't doing it professionally, or for a living
(often mutually exclusive).
As I listen to the Mac Mini anounce with an annoying, almost patronizing
computer-simulated female voice, "It's three o'clock" (in the morning),
and envy the boyfriend who is sound asleep in another room, and
contemplate how I am going to survive a 9am con-call, I wonder, for the
10th time on any given day, why I do this at all.
And then right on cue, someone sends me an email,
requesting permission to repost and translate some of the emotional abuse articles,
and I remember why it's all worth it.
heartlessly,
-Natalie
