It was supposed to be easy! I have known for a while that I would have to make some changes to the site to upgrade the infrastructure, because it was getting harder to maintain. I needed something that mirrored what I could test against.

So I did my research … really, I did. I tested the site on my local hardware against a similar set of hardware and didn’t have any problems. So I figured I was all ready to go. The process is automated on the site where the Canadian Great War Project is hosted, and it said “This process will take approximately 30 minutes. Larger sites may take longer.”

So I figured, well if it takes 4 times as long, then it’s only a couple of hours. So I set my alarm, and got out of bed at 3:00 AM, statistically the time with the least access, and started the upgrade.

… 2 hours later – site was still down.

… 4 hours later – same

… 12 hours later – I’m starting to get concerned

… 24 hours later – On the phone with tech support. Oops, the automated process stalled and left everything in limbo. “Don’t worry, we’ll straighten it out.”

So they reset things, and the site was back to its original state. Then a bit later today, they restarted the upgrade, and it worked smoothly. Except for that teeny little sentence, buried in the documentation “Applications may need to be modified after the upgrade.”

So the site came back on-line, and all kinds of error started to appear. There was a slight configuration difference between the old hardware and the new. Thankfully the error was easy to understand, and not too hard to fix … except that I had to change over 1,000 files and re-upload them to the server. My wife came in to ask me a question while I was desperately trying to get everything uploaded again. She quickly left saying “A leeeetttttlllllle bit stressed, are we?” Even Bodey Dawg took one look at me and scooted towards the other end of the room, sitting with his paws over his head!

But it all seems to be back running now.

Finally.

Some 40 hours after I started that “1/2 hour little task.”

I have a bit more checking to do, but I think I’ve got most everything running correctly. If anyone notices anything strange, please let me know.

This upgrade only affected the web pages that render the data, not the data itself, so nothing got lost … other than 40 hours.

Everyone has my sincerest apologies.

marc

The servers that host the Canadian Great War Project are going to be undergoing an upgrade sometime between Midnight and 5:00 AM US Eastern time on September 24. During this period, the Canadian Great War Project will be unavailable for a period of approximately 15 minutes.

We apologize for the inconvenience, but this is a necessary upgrade that our hosting company is implementing.

Sometimes fate gives us a chance to do things that we might otherwise miss.

A couple of weeks ago I was updating the cause of death for all the Nursing Sisters in the Canadian Great war Project. When I got to Henrietta Mellett, I noticed that the Cause of Death in Ed Wigneys Roll of Honour was listed as “Drowning”.

Henrietta Mellett was born in Galway, Ireland in 1883, and enlisted in London, Ontario in January, 1918. She appears on the 1911 Census, so she immigrated to Canada sometime prior to 1911.

As with any attempt to reconstruct events from over 90 years ago, there is some degree of speculation, but it is likely that her family had moved from Galway to Dublin and was living there in 1918. It is likely that Henrietta Mellett was returning to England on 10 October 1918 after visiting them. She was aboard the mailboat R.M.S. Leinster, with a crew of 77 and 694 passengers, bound for Holyhead, Wales  when it was attacked and sunk by the German submarine UB-123 just before 10:00 AM. The Leinster went down about 6 km outside of Dublin Bay. The official loss of life was 501 personnel, and it was possibly higher.

Fate came in to play when I saw that her body had been recovered and she was buried in Dublin. My wife and I were planning an Irish vacation, so last Tuesday, 3 weeks after looking up her cause of death, on a drizzly morning, I found myself in Mt. Jerome Cemetery in Dublin. I located her grave, as well as the grave of Private Fryday, the only other Canadian buried there. Nursing Sister Mellette is buried with her brother and sister, with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission marker atop the grave.

It is very satisfying to be able to be fortunate enough to have found that she was buried there, and to be able to make the trip to the Cemetery to honour her memory.

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but the link to the entries in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) database is no longer displayed at the bottom of the soldier display forms.

Sometime over the Labour Day Weekend, the CWGC updated their web site, and the result is that it is no longer possible for me to automatically generate a link to the CWGC pages. I’m not sure why CWGC made this change, but it is likely to cause problems for many people who have links to specific entries on  many different web sites.

I’ll continue to look at this, but in the interim you can go to the main CGWC search engine(link here) and search for the name yo are looking for.

Update 12 September.  It seems that the CWGC has seen the error of their ways, and the old link format is back working again, so it is once again available from the Canadian Great War Project.

If you haven’t already seen the notice, the Library and Archives Canada databases will be off line between 6:00 am and 12:00 pm (Eastern time) next Saturday (August 15th). Attestation papers and war diaries will not be available during this period.

In June, 2008, the Canadian Great War Project site was down for several days as a result of hackers corrupting the database. This was a very frustrating period for me; I'd fix all the damage and then within 3 minutes of bringing the site back on-line, it would be corrupted. As I examined what was happening, with some help from Bill Buss, Casie Phipps and Tom Leroux (my nephew) I was able to find a way to block these attacks. At the peak, we were getting approximately 3,000 attempts per day, but now that there are no results, the hack attempts seem to be tapering off.

If anyone is interested, there is a page with the most recent total attempts here

I've finally joined the 21st century and created my first blog page.

I'll use this to keep people informed of the latest information from the Canadian Great War Project.

The first few posts will be backfilling some of the events that have occurred lately. I realized that just putting them on the home page was no guarantee that people would read them, and we have had some exciting news lately.

I still have a lot of work to do, primarily to make the blog look more like the other pages in the site. That will come as I get more experience witht he configuration of it.

Let me know what you think.

marc