Well, hell.

The Xero site is down, and will be down for the next couple of days at least. Earthlink is moving it to a new server, and assigning a new IP address, which will take some time to propogate.

This means that, among othe things, all the LJ entries which I had placed pictures hosted on the Xero server won’t show. They dumped the contents of the server wholesale; i had backups of the site itself, but not of the LJ directory where the images were being served. (I also serve images from a different server, so many of the pics are still showing.)

On the good side, however, I have a credit card merchant account; the site’s being transferred to a different server so that the merchant acocunt processing gateway software can be installed on it.

This is fate’s little punishment for being an early adopter. 🙂 The site originally went live in the mid-1990s, and was being hosted on a DEC Alpha server using DEC’s Unix. The ecommerce software doesn’t run on Alpha servers; Earthlink had to transfer the site to a Sun server to make it work.

Wait, did I say “transfer the site?” I meant “wipe the site completely and let me upload it again to the new server.” I lost all my Apache configuration files and all my links to my Perl scripts and SSIs, many of which will now have to be rewritten, or at least modified. Lost all the feedback in the guestbooks, too.

*sigh*