Not a bad week.

In the last week or two I have received two "Hollywood movie money" gift certificates in the mail for one free movie each, had a Weber portable charcoal grill delivered to my door to be discovered two days later, and saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the night before it came out.

The first two were delivered by a prize fulfillment center. It turns out that all those times (every day for three weeks) that I logged in and tried to win the LG Life is good instant win game paid off. I didn't win the MINI Cooper S convertible, but I apparently did win the movie tickets as a second place prize in the sweepstakes drawing, and the the grill as a prize in the second chance drawing - I think. I'm actually not 100% sure what prize I won how, but do know that they both came from there. That's $60 or so worth of prizes! The downside is of course that we have a small portable grill already, but the prize one appears better, or worth more at least.

The advance screening of Harry potter was a little different. I once tried to start a business with a friend of mine. Did all the paperwork, registered with the state, everything like that. Turns out we didn't have a good business plan. We had good ideas and intentions, but no solid direction and not enough drive. The business was an IT focused business, and as such we ended up on a lot of mailing lists. Most of these have faded over the years, but some have followed me to my new address. A month and half ago I got one from APC. It had a picture of Harry Potter on it. Turns out they sponsored an advance screening. The invitation was for one person and a guest, so tonight my wife and I went from work to a restaurant, had a quick bite to eat, and then to a theater to watch a presentation of about 45 minutes from APC for some of their new technology. It was interesting to me, but bored my wife quite a bit. For our trouble we were then given a screening of Harry Potter, starting at 7:15. This was 4 hours and 45 minutes before they had their public showings. We also got some dollar bun cold sandwiches, chips, pop, and veggies before hand, and a voucher for a free popcorn and pop in the form of a survey. They also provided a packet for kids with a puzzle for them to have something to do during the presentation. These kids puzzles were all turned in and a drawing was held for a Harry Potter board game. Incidentally my wife was a bit bummed she didn't get a chance to enter that drawing.

On a more practical front we've talked to the bank and two reputable on-line lenders and are fairly (about 99%) sure of who we're going to borrow money from for a vehicle - but that's all I'm saying about that for now.

In all, it hasn't been a bad week.

Post upgrade write up.

I did a server migration at work last weekend that ended up being rather uneventful.

The change was upgrading a Microsoft IIS 5.0 server to a Microsoft IIS 6.0 server. I did a lot of research for this change almost a year ago, then again this summer, and finally again two weeks ago.

The first time I was going to do the migration one of the primary stakeholders put a hold on it. They cited not being ready for the uncertainty of migration as their reason. I gave them the benefit as I had other server upgrades from Windows 2000 to 2003 to do.

The second time we went to do the upgrade I discovered that the version of ColdFusion Server they were running was not compatible. I also learned that we needed to buy the new version, I even specced out a couple of places to get it from and forwarded the information on. They sat on it.

This last time they finally got the software purchased and I committed a time, not giving them a chance to back out. They were fine with it this time though, especially since the old server no longer backs up to tape.

I ran into a small hitch the Friday before the migration. I felt really stupid the next morning with our Cisco consultant when it turned out that the old server had lost it's default gateway in IP configuration. I started to ask him how that could have happened, and then stopped mid-way through with an "Oh wait, it's a Microsoft Server - never mind." I'm honestly not sure how that happened, but cannot believe I didn't check such a simple setting.

Once that was taken care of the next 4.5 hours were spent running the IIS 6 migration tool and creating the ODBC connections on the new server. The IIS side of things went flawlessly and with no trouble. The ODBC connections went almost as flawlessly. There were some directories outside of IIS that didn't get copied over, but I was able to get them copied over so the database files could be referenced.

Monday morning the fun began. Any migration results in things not working, right? This was no different.

The AutoDesk MapGuide server seemed to not be working right. After about an hour and a half of working with the admins for that software package (in-house) I discovered the problem. Turns out that the executable that was allowed during the IIS and MapGuide install was not the one referenced in their code. I needed to either get all of their code changed, or add the proper file to the proper list. The file's were the exact same file name/version/function. I got the new location added in and everything started to work.

After this we had a few small ODBC issues, and SQL permissions on the server were somewhat messed up. (consolidating the SQL servers to a single cluster is a project for next fall I think, but I know it's a whole different story...) Those have been mostly straightened out. Tuesday I think I only had one or two things to do, re-map a couple of user drives so they could maintain some of the aforementioned databases for instance.

In all I would say a successful migration with minimal headache. Microsoft seems to have done a lot to improve their upgrade path compared to what people had to deal with when I was still in the Navy. It seems that now almost anyone could be a Windows system administrator, but you still want someone who knows what to do or how to find the right answer when things do not work out right.