A peak behind the (hosting) scenes of this blog.
I should start by saying that the server on which this blog is posted was set up in June 1993. Although the physical object has been replaced a few times, and had been “virtualised” about 15 years ago, a small number of the underlying software base components may well date way back, perhaps even to 1993. This system had begun to get unreliable in recent years, and it was decided about 6 months ago to build an entirely new virtual server and then migrate stuff to it.
This switch over from old to new servers happened on June 14 2024 and a DNS host tables switch was made to point the URL of the server to the new version rather than the old one. A significant change was to move from php 7 to php 8 and doing this broke a couple of the installed WordPress plugins. The most important was KCite, which handles the referencing of each post. The input is merely the DOI of the reference and Kcite expands this to a full citation and inserts this at the foot of the post. Whilst we wait for a new version of Kcite to appear (which will in fact do a great deal more than the old one), references here will appear merely as [cite]DOI[/cite] for the time being. The other breakage was the ORCID plugin, which inserts the author ORCID into the post.
There are other things broken which will be worked upon over the next few days or so. Initially, images were broken, but it seems this has now been fixed specifically for the invocation https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=27133 rather than https://www.ch.imperial.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=27133, an error caused by internal use of two different host names, one of which had been set up as alias of the other when Imperial College was “rebranded” about 20 years ago from ic.ac.uk to imperial.ac.uk. The new server does not currently like this mixing! Another misbehaving feature is the invocation of Jmol 3D molecular models by image clicking, which produces “Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 412 (Precondition Failed)”. Whilst we ponder this, bear with us. Meanwhile, the server is much more responsive and previous 3 minutes pauses in response hopefully are now fixed.
A 31 year old web server and its underlying services is a positive dinosaur in this information age (if anyone has one that has been broadcasting from the same URL for longer, please let me know). Hopefully, now that it has been given a transplant, it will go on for a few years longer.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 15th, 2024 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Interesting chemistry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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