Up periscope...

"Up periscope... scanning horizon... clear to surface..."

This last month seems like 2-3 months in one month. Mainly we moved house, which we had intended doing earlier in the year when it was cooler, but happened in July. The house move went well and can be read in detail in Sue's blog, but it did take me away from other work for quite a while.

Then there was editing to catch up on. This training DVD just won't go away...

Then we have a major rebuild of the servers. One of my colleagues from Egypt has come over for the month so that Peter, he and I can all work together so that we are all understanding the system together.

What we wanted to do was an upgrade to one of the database systems we host to stabilize it for 3 years - obviously minor upgrades during that time, but the major one now. Within that upgrade we wanted to have automatic backup of the data and automatic changeover between the servers. This is called clustering. Another change had been in process by the programmer of the system and that was to incorporate all the images into the database.

Everything worked well until the day we were due to switch over from the old system to the new... when we tried it we found that one of the databases was very large indeed and clustering required more resources that we have available, but that the newer version of the database software would probably handle the large database better. So now we are in investigation for how to proceed as the databases will grow significantly during the 3 years we want this system to work for.

Alongside this, there is the war in Lebanon. We hadn't anticipated getting our guest apartment ready yet, but had to do so in a hurry to accomodate a couple who had evacuated Lebanon.