Web Server Upgrade, Part 2

It's been one heck of an enduring battle, but after waging war with the new web server gremlins -- and after standing vigilantly for the last 5 days in hopes that the hosting company could resolve a number of outstanding issues -- I finally decided that "enough was enough" and had the system re-imaged [formatted] all over again. Of course, this meant that I had to reinstate all the dedicated web server software and web pages by remote command-line.

Not fun.

It was a royal pain in the neck, but it appears that the second walk-thru has cleared the path and things *seem* to be much more stable than they were previously [fingers crossed]. The good news is that if I ever have to format the server again, down-time should be minimal as this second experience allowed me to streamline all the step-by-step installation notes that I compiled during the first attempt.

RE: emails

Your letters to me are what keep the newsletter content interesting and ever-evolving.

Unfortunately, I may have missed out on a few emails while the old web servers were being consolidated and while new web server was being configured.

I also have close to 100 emails in my inbox which were downloaded to my laptop before the server upgrade began. I haven't been able to respond to these letters due to the maintenance, but am hoping that -- providing that there are no more server issues -- I will be getting around to responding to these letters shortly.

If you sent me a message that is vitally important and have not yet received a response, you are welcome to send it again using the web form on our site:

http://www.infopackets.com/contact.htm?subject=did_you_get_my_message?

On a related note: I'd like to thank the handful of folks who were lucky enough to get an email through to me over the weekend -- especially those who sent in a letter of encouragement with respect to the server upgrade. Here's one of the letters I received from Gazette Reader Beverly H.:

" Dear Dennis,

I very much enjoy your newsletter and have used many of your articles to improve my PC; I've even researched old volumes to find answers to specific questions I had. I get several tech newsletters via email (the best of the best), and I have to say: Infopackets beats the others -- hands down!!!

In content selection and verbiage, you are definitely gifted at wording technical jargon in lay-mans terms. And like they say about a good preacher: you get something out of every sermon. Well, the same can be said of your newsletter and supplemental tutorials.

After reading your last newsletter and seeing that the cost for the new server will most likely exceed the cost of $5,000 annually, I can certainly appreciate that you want to do a fund raiser -- but for people like me, it would be easiest to just make a 'donation', or 'contribution' (or whatever you want to call it).

On that note, I also want to mention that I sometimes miss an issue of your newsletter here and there, so maybe you could send out a newsletter entitled 'new web server contribution', or such, so people like me don't miss the opportunity to contribute to such a worthy cause. I know this might seem too direct to some people reading your newsletters, but it makes sense to me. After all, life is so busy now-a-days, sometimes it's a situation of do it now or never!

Thanks again for all your dedication and hard work you put in toward writing Infopackets. I can't imagine where I'd be without it. "

RE: more comments and suggestions

If you have some uplifting thoughts you'd like to share (similar to Beverly's) -- and especially if you have a unique idea for our upcoming server fund-raiser, please feel free to drop me a line.

http://www.infopackets.com/contact.htm?subject=server_fundraiser_and_comments

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