The Scribbled Notes of the overworked

Preparations and a new coat of paint

Its been a tough winter for the survival of the SEATONNET project. There have been times in the last 4 months when I thought it was going to have to fold but, in the end it was easier to keep it going than to kill it off.

With what has been an immensely enjoyable experience over the last 6 years (and although still well out of pocket the cash drain caused by Seaton Telecom's bad debts has all but stopped) this last month has all been about breathing new life into the enterprise, re-organising broadband connections, installing and re-configuring routers and getting everything up and running ready for the new years visitors.

The last week has seen me building a new website and hopefully a new look to SEATONNET to bring it to life and give it some welly for 2011 and the price increases may well fill the hole in the kitty before the winter sets in and I have to put hand-in-pocket to cover the winter costs again. Lets all hope for a really long and hot summer in East Devon this year and lots of visitors to boost the local economy.

Moving House is a strain

When I decided that things had to change just before Christmas I also realised that the changes would mean a lot of work and effort to get things into position. Moving the Servers for SEATONNET was like moving house, first a lot of planning, backing up and sorting through things to see what was necessary to keep, and then when all that was done the task of packing seemed to go on forever. Cables, disks, marking up of connections between servers and firewalls and the outside world. It went on and on.

Finally, the day came to make the move and although the lines were in the process of transferring across for all the locations I had one line pre-arranged so that I could test the new settings and ensure the setup was 100%.

Even so it took nearly two days before things were looking like they were beginning to settle down and although I have still got a good head of hair it was touch and go as to whether I managed to keep it through the week it took to reorganise everything.

Here we are at the end of January and I'm beginning to feel as if the light is on and I'm almost home. The server is working, the firewall has been reconfigured, the locations are in the process of transferring and luckily at this time of year there is very little pressure from the outside world.

Even though my full-time work is keeping me busy the strain of transferring this lot has been a nightmare of thinking beyond that normally required to see me out of bed in the morning and back to it at night so, without a doubt I can see some R&R time coming up soon. Its amazing though how a single line of code can keep you locked out for hours and even days. Next time....