After a long hiatus, it looks like I have my server problems resolved. Unfortunately, however, it required purchasing a new box to do it. The main drive on the old box became increasingly unstable - sometimes staying on for hours, other times rebooting before Windows really completed startup. Files went missing, registry entries got corrupted, it was a huge mess and I'm still not 100% sure what caused it. My strong suspicion is that a virus slipped in and I tried all sorts of things to get it checked, but apparently nobody makes virus scan boot disk images to run off of a cold reboot anymore. It's possible that the hard disk itself was failing, but in the end I couldn't keep it online long enough to check.
So, the new box is a cheapie but (I think) a goodie - a Compaq Presario (which now means it's basically an HP) with an AMD X2 4450e dual core CPU, 3GB of RAM, a 250GB SATA hard drive, a DVDRW with LightScribe, and onboard nVidia graphics. All for $300. Not bad, since pretty much all this will be is a web server and maybe an ftp box down the line. The SATA drive connections are going to cause a problem with adding the old hard drives that still work from the defunct box (because they're IDE drives and not compatible with SATA), but I think I'll just end up buying some external HD enclosures and running them off the USB 2.0 connectors (this box has 6 of them).
In any case, it looks like the blog is up and functioning nominally at this point, so give it a whirl and let me know if you run into any problems. There's still some tweaking to be done, as I found some articles that detailed some Perl modules that will help to make user logins faster and hopefully help the posting of entries and comments to go faster, and I'm also going to have to go in and do some minor hardware tweaks and give the database more room to play in since I have twice as much memory and CPU power as I did before. So, if the blog is down or not responsive, give it an hour or two and then try back and if you're still having trouble, then hit me up and let me know what you're seeing so I can fix it.
Hopefully, all is well for the foreseeable future, seeing as everything is now pretty much brand new. I'll be back posting in a little bit because I have a huge review of the Pre to post now that my "voice" is back online.
So I'm going to test out the comment subsystem by also adding that the new machine is super-duper quiet. My old box was a huge, nearly waist-level monstrosity that had four fans in it. The box was a lot bigger than the computer inside, but I wanted plenty of room to monkey around in it as well as add hard drives. I also overclocked the thing and the arrangement of the CPU in relation to the power supply was sub-optimal, hence the large number of fans to prevent it from overheating.
Anyway, it was loud.
The new box is so quiet that it's kind of freakin' me out. It's like trying to sleep when you're used to having a fan or some other sort of white noise on and realizing that it's not there. I can hear things now that I didn't hear before and the volume of the computer suddenly sounds...too loud. It's crazy.
But I think it's a good kind of crazy.
And I'm commenting from the Pre at this juncture so's I can test the external comment logins (which seem to be working). Sweet baby ray, I love technology!!!
Sweet Baby A . . . .! Nice goin'! 'Tis good to have things working right for a change.