What happened.
So there’s been some vague interest in the technical bits of what actually happened to my server such that I had to start from scratch like this. I do feel some obligation to put my experience up on the net for others to avoid my fate, but there’s really only one salient point: back your shit up regularly. More regularly than you do now. Someday you will get in over your head with these infernal machines, and then, I assure you, you will do something bad. Then you will, in your ignorance, do something worse to try to fix it, and so on. In the end, all roads lead to FUBAR.
So back that thang up; if not for Juvenile, then for me. Please.
In my case, it happened one day that I could not rebuild the index of my blog. It would rebuild the individual and monthly archives, but then crap out with a database error. I found this fix, which seemed close enough to my situation to be relevant. It’s funny, he acts like “cd to the directory where the database lives” is trivial. I had no idea where the fuck it was, and when even ’sudo cd’ wouldn’t get me in (because there’s no such thing) I was flummoxed. Eventually I logged in as root and ran the myisamchk. Didn’t work, and now, lovely of lovelies, ‘mysql’ and ‘mysqld’ could not be found. Couldn’t understand the messages in the error log regarding why MySQL couldn’t launch at startup. I managed to install an updated version of MySQL, but I couldn’t figure out how to do anything besides cp’ing the mov_type database directory to the data directory of the new installation. This almost worked, in that the mt.cgi frontend finally loaded and gave me a login screen. Unfortunately, none of my old logins worked. So I was all ready to run mt-load.cgi, which might or might not erase my old blog, but at least the MT installation would work, or at least I thought it would. Never got the chance to find out, though, because OS X.2 Server decided that it was tired of serving web pages and answering domain queries, so it just quit. Decided never to go past the boot screen. After some mucking about in single-user mode, I couldn’t get anything but a blue screen and beachball. At this point I just said fuck it (actually I think I told Arthur I was gonna smash the server with a hammer and pee on it) and brought out my regular Jaguar CDs. This blog is now being served from a different hard drive, with a brand new OS X 10.2.6 installation and the newest available versions of MySQL, PHP, BIND, etc. I pray it lasts this time; if I really wanted to learn all this shit in depth, I would have ditched my Mac for Linux a long time ago.
evan :: Sep.16.2003 :: Notices :: No Comments »