My job title may be the grandly sounding Web and Digital Media officer, but I am essentially a web designer; I’m also writer; I can paint and draw… I am essentially a creative individual. I like technology and I enjoy gadgets, and yes, I’m quite geeky but I’m a computer a nerd. The one part of my job description where really I have very little clue is server maintenance, and yet I am supposed to maintain them. These are public-facing, business critical webservers and I am somehow supposed to troubleshoot them when they go wrong.
For the record they do go wrong, both of them. One is old and slow, and refuses to be backed up and the other decides to go unreponsive for no apparent reason. I have been lumbered with two of them because one ones ASP and runs PHP. It should be possible to have both on one but could I get the two systems to play nice. Could I heck?!
So, I spent the day with my old boss, completely reformatting a spare, new, server that we happened to have sitting idle, and started from scratch setting up everything that we would need to have the two systems running nicely together. Hey, and guess what it all works. I haven’t got so far as setting up the websites in duplicate on it, but the technology works. But, I would have been lost without IT guidance as to what to do which has proved something to me – I can build websites and problem solve code at that level but when it goes beyond that to hardware configuration, I just don’t have the brain for it.
