Some Background and Getting Started
Last weekend, a relatively new customer of mine moved their production hosting from a private dedicated server running ASP.NET to ORCSWeb cloud hosting. They were running SqlServer 2000 and Windows Server 2003. We moved them to Microsoft Windows 2008 and Sqlserver 2008. These kind of moves of productions servers always make me very nervous. It seems like even though we make list after list, check the lists twice, test moving the SqlServer databases, etc., something always seems to go wrong. In this case, their SqlServer database is 50Gig so that adds a little interest also.
The moved started at 8PM eastern time. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until I actually tried running the data on the new server. Boom! Http Error 500 (Internal Error). It’s now about 11PM eastern time and I’m on the west coast at 8PM. I realize I’m getting kind of hungry (and stupid because of that) so I decided to take a 30 minute break and grab some food. After getting food, I decided to call my managed hosting support time (now near midnight on the east coast where ORCSWeb is) and Artur answers the page.
Now Comes The Amazing Part
I explain the problem to Artur who quietly listens to my long winded and winding explanation of how I got where I did. Basically, I’m wanting him to look at server logs and help me diagnose what is wrong. After he patiently listened to me (and I was finished with my long winded explanation), Artur says “I was thinking about calling you a while ago when I noticed your server was generating errors. I took a look and found several things wrong in the setup including permissions errors”. He then goes on to say “So, I fixed those errors and everything seems to be working now”.
Wow! It never occurred to me to check to see if the server magically started working after I came back from my short dinner. It was, and it is!