Write it down stupid!

So I have just paid the price, lets say conservatively at 2.5 hours. The simple solution would have been to write everything down. But you never know when. As is always obvious, "when" should not been 14 months *after* you have last done something but that 20:20 hindsight for you.

The challenge? Reboot the system. Why? Well after 14 months it needed a minor refresh for Google Analytics. I guess that I have at least proved that I built something reliable! All of this took a zero downtime from the users perspective, other than a need to log in again.

So after I figured out (again) how to start and stop on instances on EC2, kick started with the right parameters and remembered all the DNS tricks I got it up and running again.

Oh, and I then took 20 minutes to write it all up with the rest of the documentation on Google Docs...