Friday the 13th had one good thing occur: Our recalcitrant search engine is now functioning thanks to stellar help from a friend "K" in Florida. This completes, we hope, the long and painful upgrade that at times resembled a Three Stooges cavalcade. In bringing subsystems back, we had to make priorities--most of which are behind the scenes that you would never know. The search engine, sadly, was almost last on the list, and caused the most problems. At one time, it would perform a search and then not be able to figure out where to send the search results. At another point, it would index the files up to #4655 and then suffer a seizure. Then there was the phantom function that ran and ran, sucking up resources without ever stopping. Those of you familiar with such details may chuckle at such dilemmas. I believe I once likened the process to a game of Whack-a-Mole: no sooner do you pound one problem into the ground than another pops up. For the rest of us, it was a frustrating pain. Of course, it's easy to focus on the negative things. The whole reason we went through the upgrade is to make our server a little faster, hold more data, and update to the latest software version. Most of the time, we do this so transparently, most never notice the process. That's the way it should be. But we did go for a double this time: hardware and software. Perhaps that was too ambitious. I apologize anew for the inconvenience, and we've demanded that our techie hired guns put in a more stringent procedure to ensure this never happens again. --Russ Lockwood, CEO, MagWeb.com Back to 3rd Quarter 2004 List of News Items Back to Master List of News Items Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 2004 by Coalition Web, Inc. This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com