Oct 4

Written by: Jeremy Bonine
10/4/2010 5:00 PM 

I have a pretty diverse background when it comes to work that I have done. Part of that time was being a help desk technician and eventually working to be a technician I/II (network engineer, but more on that in a bit). I did another career change, went back to school and became a software developer.  A friend of mine got an idea for an on-line appointment application and development started on appointment2appointment.com. When software development was done for appointment2appointment.com (don’t bother looking for the url – read on) in 2004 I had went with a dedicated server from Server Beach (btw: was a great company that got acquired by peer1). Never having any sales or time to really devote to getting sales (having a full time job this was a personal venture with a friend) we had one paying customer. So the server really grew to be a test server for different projects and to run my own website and email from. But in 2009 looking to cut some cost I decided I could do this myself. Getting business Internet access, and a sonic wall firewall I setup my servers. I had one hardware box with a dedicated external 2TB backup drive. Server had (6) hard drives, (2) with Raid 0 for OS/Apps, and (4) Raid 5 for data. Not my ideal setup, but what my budget could do. Server was 2008 w/Hyper-V running 2 virtual servers (1) for SQL and (1) for Applications. Both virtual servers had 2 virtual network adapters, one private, one public – private for server-server communication, public for updates, and application access (web sites, email, etc). Seemed like a great solution and pretty secure. And all was good for just a little over a year like that, then due to some faulty hardware, the SQL Server got some write errors that resulted in the server thinking it was no longer activated (seems I could have just deleted the c:\windows\SoftwareDistribution folder but didn’t learn that till the same thing happened to the only running server). This all happened during a period of time that I was busy working on other projects and so wasn’t doing my daily server checks. So the server went past what it thought was a trial period and thought it was now an illegal copy of windows server – shutting down services. In a panic and a long night I got SQL working on the running server, connected the virtual hard drive from the SQL Server copied over the DB’s and got everything back up and running. To cut what could be a 4-page explanation down, eventually the same fault happened with the remaining server found the solution (before MS Engineers could even call me back – thank goodness for Bing and Google searching). However, at that time I also discovered that my DB’s were trashed (bad indexes that couldn’t be fixed) and so were not backing up and couldn’t backup/restore to a different server also. It was more time/money than I had to get all the data off the server and migrate services to a cloud based server. I made the decision to shut down appointment2appointment.com. Hosting services were easy to migrate to a cloud based solution so those I still offer, lost some customers, but in the end I learned a valuable lesson, just because you might know how to do something doesn’t mean you should.

Copyright ©2010 Jeremy Bonine