A Feeling of Accomplishment

I like a feeling of accomplishment, don’t you? You feel so empowered.

I got a call that a local facility had a couple computers down. One they sent off to the computer repair place. They said the system appeared to have been deleted and loaded it with a newer version of Windows. The other they called me about.

I was unable to fix it in place because of time constraints so I loaded it up in the truck during one of my daily trips last week to town. The network was not working and I suspected spyware/adware/virus.

When I started working on it I found I could access my local network but not the internet. I looked for an obvious redirect but didn’t see one. However, when I loaded Internet Explorer and tried to access websites, I noticed the computer was trying to access websites by their IP address rather than by name. This is a common trick used by software that redirects you to sites other than the one you typed in. They can hide the IP address in code without clear text website names that are easier for anti-virus software to detect.

After cleaning the system, I accessed the internet and downloaded what patches are still available for Windows XP. Then I went about finding what happened to the user account and why it could not even get a desktop. IT turns out that user was no longer the owner of the files, so I fixed that and magically the system was back where it should be with all files intact.

Then I got a call that my blog had been offline. I checked and it appeared to have been down for many days (perhaps weeks).

The system was running what I think was proprietary blogging software but was recently upgraded to WordPress. We lost some capabilities that we had on the old system, however this change brought the blogging experience up to date. I told another users that I could not believe the system would be down for good, especially after the work to convert it and format massive numbers of blog entries into the new system. My blog alone contains 1500+ entries over 12 or more years.

However, since the system had been down so long, I decided to grab my backup blog posting which I had saved and began formatting them into my own WordPress site. The first attempt showed a number of issues loading HTML in. The titles were missing and each entry now said “Posted on February 11, 2016″ instead of the original date. I wanted all posts to look and act as though they had been uploaded on the date they were created. I was finally able to get titles and dates working correctly. I loaded all the blog entries and then discovered some other major issues. I deleted all the online entries, reformatted and loaded again. At that point I still found some issues and corrected that. Then this morning when I thought all was correct, something happened in my process and few of the entries were displaying correctly.

It was later in the day, as I was getting ready to start from scratch that the magic happened!

The blogging website came to life! Talk about timing! Yes, it would have been better if I had not attempted to recreate the site on my own because I wasted much of 2 days, but hey, it was a great experience.

The feeling of accomplishment Not mine! I’ll leave that to the guy who got the original site up. He deserves it!