Library Web Chic

So yesterday was the day we migrated our ILLiad server off campus to Atlas Systems hosted service. Overall, I think that it went pretty well. I still have a host of little bugs to work out. However, many of these leftover bugs were a result of me forgetting just how much we have customized our instance of ILLiad. I remembered all the big stuff. The earth shaking, database alterations, and the fact that we have lovely ASP pages that query the ILLiad database and run reports.

What I forgot were som small but rather important little things. First, because we run Microsoft servers at Cortland and ILLiad runs on a Microsoft server, we tweaked out ILLiad web server so we could use server side includes and ASP as part of the pages. I completely forgot about this in setting ILLiad up with Atlas. So I called Atlas to see if be kind enough to deal with this customization of ours by changing the server setting there. No luck. However, ILLiad has a built-in includes function that isn’t as good as regular SSIs but will do in a pinch. After editting all the pages things are back to normal.

The second thing is that we have homegrown reports written in ASP. I’d remembered to ask for a read-only account to connect to the ILLiad SQL Server database, but forgot that some of the reports rely on an append query which a read-only account can’t perform. So I made another phone call to Atlas, who were not going to give me write access. However, they showed me a nifty trick with SQL which would allow me to query a query. Great stuff, which I saved in my code folder for future reference. All and all it wasn’t a horrible day since things got fix. However, it just goes to show you that when you do this kind of migration you need to think about things as if you were a novice and had no prior knowledge if you want to make sure every single excruciating and important detail is covered.