A few weeks ago we had a failure on the web site. Actually a hard failure, a BSOD, which I haven't seen in years. Of course I didn't know it was a BSOD. We were having issues on the web site so I rebooted the server on a Friday afternoon while my kids were on spring break. I was working with them in the background and waiting for the server to come back up.

And waiting.

Finally about 10 minutes later I realized that it wasn't coming up. And this was the one server without a remote, out of band card. Actually, come to think of it, both servers are missing the card. Not that it would have helped, but I decided to switch to the new web server.

I'd been testing, but some of the software we use is specific to a URL, as in licensed to a URL. So a few things were barely tested. Apparently blogs were one of them. However I switched and the articles and forums worked

I packed up the kids, drove to the co-lo and found the BSOD. That made me nervous even though the server rebooted fine. Still I hate to roll back and I'd been meaning to move onto this server, so I left it and went back to work after feeding the kids.

So one of the first things I find that weekend is blogs are broken. Now we run the Community Server, 1.0 or 1.1 from Telligent Systems. Brian installed it and I had no idea how it worked. So I turned it over to him. The only real difference was the we moved from W2K to W2K3, which could be a big difference.

After a lot of late night emails back and forth Sunday night we were stumped. I'd copied things over, setup the IIS site as close as I could and it was erroring out. So I called our contract programmer, enabled his account (speaking of which.... yep, disabled again), and set him working on it. He spent a 3-4 part time nights looking at it, going back and forth with me and we couldn't figure things out.

So I started digging in. It's an ASP.NET app, supposedly simple to setup, but I couldn't find any issues. The posts at communityserver.org didn't generate any help. I did get some help from Michael Coles who volunteered to look through things and give some hints. I really appreciate his help and a lot of suggestions, most of which I hadn't thought of. It didn't help, but he had me moving forwad.

So finally this weekend I had some time and setup a new web site and copied over the folders.  I moved the site from a virtual directory to a root web site, new DNS, new host, etc. and had to make a few changes in the db.

And it worked.

Crazy. It wasn't a W2K3, at least I think it wasn't, but in any case, it's now working.