babyblog

Get. Out. Of. My. House.

It's been a while, but UKChat is back. Here. In my house.

When we first launched, we used to run UKChat from our house. We had a 2mb fibre piped into the house which came in via the back garden as one couldn't possibly dig up the interlocked paving out front in the private road darling could one? Far better to go through the scummy council estate behind.

It was unheard of, at the time, to have this kind of connection in your home. Expensive too, cost us 600 UKP per month back then. And on the end of it, a rack and a load of servers which ran, primarily, UKChat.

And what fun it was.

Invariably, if we EVER went away ANYWHERE, one of the servers would crash and we'd have to go home.

Then there was the time that the Electric Co. installed a key meter while we were away for a weekend. Key meters were a nightmare. Designed for non-bill-paying-wasters they forced you to pay for your electricity up front by taking your key to the local BP Garage and handing over cash. Cash. Not credit card. Not cheque. Cash. They would then 'charge' up your key which you then brought home and inserted back into your meter to give yourself more electric. Well, with the amount of juice we used, this was an absolute disaster. The fact that they fitted one of these things in the first place was a mistake - we paid our bills. They were doing some kind of 'drive' to install them everywhere at the time, and unfortunately for us decided to install ours while we were out of town. When we came back, the house was in darkness. THinking there had been a power cut we called them and discovered that this thing had been put in place and also that there had been no 'key' left behind for us to charge up. 'But you can't have run out of electricity Ma'am, we left you enough to cover you for the period it takes to get your key through in the mail'. Yes, assuming one wasn't RUNNING UKCHAT FROM ONES HOUSE. They promised to send a man around and in the meantime we ran an extension lead next door to a kind neighbour who took pity on us 'just for a light and a cup of tea' and powered up the servers.

Over the next few weeks UKChat mysteriously went offline several times as we ran out of electric on the key and had to make a mad dash around to the BP Garage at 3am. Finally we got the Electric co. to change the meter back to a proper one. They were baffled by the amount of power we were getting through. We weren't, and neither was our bank account.

Following the 'key meter incident' UKChat continued to go offline mysteriously from time to time. Usually coinciding with me plugging in the kettle or the iron. Neil eventually came over and helped G re-wire the office to bypass my small appliances and our house then had attractive giant cables running across the ceilings.

Of course we also mustn't forget the time one of the UKChat servers mysteriously blew up. Taking it apart, we discovered it was absolutely full of dog hair.

Oh, the professionalism.

We were extremely relieved, not to mention financially so, when UKChat finally moved into Telehouse when we moved to Canada. Now, at last, it was Neil's problem (LOL, sorry Neil!). There it has stayed, successfully, for the last 3 and a half years... until this week when the trusty server finally gave up for good after all these years of abuse, and we had to buy a new one. While Neil installs the new one, UKChat is now running partly out of my basement. In my house. Again.

In bed last night, G said to me 'There's people chatting in our house' while we're up here sleeping.

!

Posted by katie at December 10, 2004 06:12 PM