Server maintenance goes swimmingly!

Yesterday, we completed our planned server maintenance period and I'm happy to report that the mail server and web server were both sorted out well within the 4 hour window (1 hour 56 mins to be precise) we had allotted for the work. The servers are now sporting new updated RAID firmware and the latest BIOSes for their hardware. The web server also has a shiny new hard drive in its array as one of the original drives was in a state of "predicted fail".

This was our first physical trip to see the servers in 2 years and our first ever visit to the new co-location building operated by RapidSwitch. Overall downtime in the 2 years (caused by planned software updates etc.) has been kept to a minimum with server availability being well over 99.9% for the last 24 months. Over the last couple of months however, we've had reason to use the engineers at RapidSwitch to perform some minor maintenance procedures on our servers and we have been more than happy with their performance but when it comes to doing BIOS updates, we'd rather do that ourselves!

Converting a site from PHP to ColdFusion 8 using the New Media CMS

We recently took on the re-development of a reasonably busy website with a large amount of mixed content that was originally written in a mix of straight HTML and dynamic php pages with around 130 pdf documents as well.

The overall health of the site prior to re-development was not great. There were a hundred or so faulty links, pointing to .htm files instead of .php files and vice versa which resulted in a couple of hundred 404 page not found errors. The HTML that the site used wasn't standards compliant which caused rendering issues in some of the less popular browsers and the sites search engine rankings were poor due to a lack of decent search engine optimisation on the site. From an accessibility point of view, the site would only work correctly if JavaScript and full image capabilities were enabled and it looked just awful on mobile devices.