Some of you may have noticed that several pages on this blog have been generating 404 errors for the past week or so. This was due, in part, to my recent migration to a Windows Server 2008 (IIS7) machine. Most of the blogs service interruption could have been avoided had I properly "test drove" the website after the migration. But in my haste I simply transferred the files to the remote server, hit the home page, and called it a night. Little did I know that most of the blogs content was unreachable.

It wasn’t until nearly five days later that I tried to post a new entry and discovered that something was wrong with my blog. After a few support tickets with my hosting provider I came to the conclusion that the fault wasn’t on their end, but rather a problem with dasBlog and/or its configuration that was preventing it from running under IIS7. Now, this is the part of the story where I shamefully admit that I was using a old version of dasBlog… a REALLY old version. In fact I think the version I was running probably was released right when Windows Server 2008 was first released.

As it turned out the cause of a weeks worth of blog outage was in fact my own slothfulness. Had I taken the time to more properly test the site after migration, or perhaps even upgrade my version of dasBlog I could have minimized the impact of the transfer. I am now happily running version 2.2.8279.16125, up from dasBlog v. 2.0.7226.0) and I must say that the upgrade was easy. I simply overlayed the new version of dasBlog over my existing installation and then manually reconfigured the SiteConfig/site.config and SiteConfig/siteSecurity.config files and that was it.

Note to self: When software is as old as (or older than) the platform it is running on, don’t assume it will just work out of the box.