So, here I am trying to use LibraryThing as a regular member. Time to catalog some recent acquisitions, look through Talk a little, maybe say “Hi” to some of the people I miss. I post a couple of messages, notice the site is a little slow, and saw a banner about the Subjects being a little wonky. Then, for some reason, someone emailed me to tell me the site was down! How could this be? I was just on it! And then it occurred to me that I still had my pass-through enabled, which allowed me to get into the site even when something was wrong or when maintenance was being performed.
Then something else hit me: I can’t do anything about it anymore. I even recognized what the problem was from an error message that I saw when I pulled up my profile. Talk about a horrible feeling. I know exactly how to fix it, how to get the site back up in under 10 minutes, and get things back to normal. But I can’t. I have been sitting here ping-ponging about whether or not to send a note over there, but I decided that I shouldn’t - they need to know how to do this next time it happens. On the other hand, I’m actually a very nice person (even if I do say so myself) and altruistic to a fault, so I REALLY want to help! Augh!
Knowing that still doesn’t make it any easier, and I deeply wish my offer to stay on had been accepted. Heck, I almost begged :-) Maybe if anyone sees this entry, they can let the crew over there know to drop the bad table from the broken slave and restore it from the backup MyISAM slave, then convert it back to Inno if necessary. And mind those file ownerships/permissions! Oh and don’t forget to “STOP SLAVE” on the backup machine first!
January 23rd, 2007 at 2:08 am
Take some time off! :-)
Then, after a month or so it might feel not so strange to email Tim your ideas about where to look - it’s what we all do, although your guesses would have more background foundation.
Also, there is LibraryThing-ers Anonymous ;-p
January 24th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Thanks for everything Chris-especially the graphical widgets-but mostly for almost no down time on the site. Best of luck-but don’t disappear from LT.
Nina
January 24th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Yep, definitely taking time off — I just tore down a bunch of my basement ceiling. It’s that yucky fiberglass composite stuff from the 60’s so my hands are all itchy now (yes, I wore gloves, a respirator, and safety glasses!) so my typing is a little worse than usual.
I’m looking forward to contributing to LT as a user. It’s going to be a lot of fun for me, I have a lot of stuff to catalog!
Boy, I can’t wait for him to dig into the graphical widget code a little — I left some gifts in there :-)
Thanks to all of you!
January 28th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
If I were just another LT user and had any idea (like you did) about what the problem was, I’d have tried to contact them with the fix right away.
That said, it’s probably good you didn’t. I’ve left a couple jobs where a couple of YEARS later someone dialed me up to ask if I knew where some file was, or whatever happened to something else, or if I knew what the stuff in that particular box was about. That’s worse: knowing you once knew exactly what the answer is, but — not having thought about it for months or years — now having no idea.
Best of luck with the new adventures!