Interruption level was about 2.5 hours yesterday. I took care of the bank stuff, and there were some new signups and phone consultations and support. I didn't progress on the Parallels trouble ticket; I'm going to try to make it a priority today.
Six bashful->grumpy migrations were completed, there are now 84 sites left on bashful. Several attempts failed because of a disk quota error, and I'm planning to make that the primary subject of the Parallels trouble ticket, if I can ever get past regnow.
I need to try to close some sales today, talk to the daf site, and start on the VPS for the big client. That plus migrations should keep me busy. It's also possible I'll do a little consulting.

Yesterday turned out to be a big, frustrating waste of time on the business side. On the personal side, it was great; but since this is a business blog, I won't go into it except to say that I lost about half a day. The rest of it was spent on:

• getting a couple of customers signed up
• doing some small migrations
  
• doing a small bit of low pay consulting
• contacting the bank about transferring funds from business accounts to my personal account
• contacting the local funds transfer place about setting up monthly transfers to the payroll company

Today I may do :

• more of the consulting for two different clients
• get the trouble ticket at Parallels
• do more funds transfer stuff both at the bank and the local place
• maybe another migration or two

I also need to:

• get backups working on some VPS machines
• think about migrating business sites
• upgrade the domains system
• upgrade / migrate the support system
• look into integrating the support system into the control panel

But the above will almost certainly not happen today. At least I have recent snapshots of the VPS boxes, so that's okay.

I managed to do ONE migration yesterday. Sundays are hard to do some of this kind of work; I can't call or email anyone for tech support. I did get a signup and a few new prospects; let's see if I can convert them to sales.

Today's goals include finishing up some paperwork relating to bank transfers, opening a new ticket with Parallels legacy support (I hate regnow), maybe more migrations. Between the Site Studio problem and the quota problem on grumpy, I'm really delayed on those migrations.

Also, the personal life is going to insert mondo interruptions today because there's a lot going on.

Migrations

I'm trying to phase out bashful in favor of grumpy and the cluster. Hurdles are:
* Site Studio
* my own sites
* stuff I haven't realized yet

The most difficulties are with the Site Studio sites. Parallels was kind enough to let me install a second license on grumpy, and I must say in general their legacy support has been mostly good. They never really did get to the bottom of the issues on grumpy related to the last control panel upgrade, but I have enough workarounds in place that it doesn't affect the customers, which is all I really care about.

But Site Studio is going to have to be on a separate ticket. The logs are showing that even though the import looks smooth, the files can't be overwritten by the Site Studio publish process due to some kind of a permission problem. I've been thinking of strace, but this is very time consuming at the moment, and if I'm going to meet my goals of clearing out bashful, I think I'll need their help. I've wasted too much time on this issue already.

Meanwhile, even regular imports have their challenges:
* backup
* restore twice (thanks, Ensim)
* check spam filter settings
* change DNS
* make sure I've covered any domain aliases

If I can do 5 - 10 per day I'll consider it a success. Of course this goal is hampered by the small fact that these sites are live and I've got to be very timezone sensitive. And I happen to like spending time with my family Saturday nights. And not everyone on the server is on the East Coast.

First post

This blog is intended to be a log / diary of all things Also Networks related, starting June 25th, 2010. Also Networks has been in business as a web hosting company for about 10 years now. Most of our servers at this point are in a rack in Dallas, Texas at colo4dallas.com.

The reason I'm working on this blog is that as of fairly recently I'm working full time on Also Networks, with very little time devoted to other projects, though I don't mind taking on little consulting gigs now and then to fill in some blank time.

Not that I don't have plenty to do; in fact, the main reason I'm writing this blog, at least at this point, is so that I can record, on a hopefully daily basis, the things I hope to do over the course of the day, and compare it to what I've managed to accomplish. Along the way I'll probably recall some of the pitfalls I run into, and maybe even good stuff like how-tos.

Of course my intentions may evolve over time; blogspot is free, and my fingers aren't tired at the moment.

Today is Friday. I don't do a whole lot of Also Networks work on Fridays other than the mandatory running of a few invoices, answering emails, and monitoring the servers. Saturday is off, and I'll resume work on Sunday.