TheGarage Tech Blog

Last night I upgraded the MySQL database behind this site from version 4 to 5. I needed to test the process before I upgrade the Gulf Coast Texas Magazine site. If I dig around in the documentation at 1and1 I could probably tell from which version to which, but the options on the setup menu are MySQL 4 or MySQL 5.  Suffice to say the version 4  was low enough that the Simple:Press forum plugin for WordPress wouldn’t install. Even if I don’t ultimately use the plugin, I simply have to look under the hood of that bad boy.

The worst thing about the whole MySQL upgrade process — which involves dumping the schema and data from the version 4 database into a SQL file and then running the SQL dump on a new, empty MySQL version 5 database — was that 1and1 had difficulty managing the upload of the SQL dump file and then running the SQL. When I uploaded the file it took forever and finally reported complete but there were no tables — still an empty database. I tried it twice. Took forever twice. Twice no tables.

So I manually split the SQL dump file into several little chunks and built the version 5 database a wee bit at a time. How ridiculous is that when the entire process should have taken five minutes, ten at the most, but your hosting service provider sucks so bad that the job required a couple of hours. Hard for a developer to make money that wy.

It says in the 1and1 documentation:

Note: If the database export does not work correctly you can try to export one table at a time. Select the table from the left side of the MySQL Administration screen and click Export.

Lame. So I guess I’m not surprised. How hard could it be to simply make the feature work?

The faq’s that I found confirming that there is no automatic process to upgrade a database are hard to find on the 1and1 search, you need to use another, real  search engine to find the information. You can check these if interested in the 1and1 MySQL upgrade process –> Export, Import

But here is the real complaint. After the long ordeal descibed above I finally had the entire database loaded so I edited my wp-config to point to the new database and it’s like nothing ever happened… Except that there seems to be a bunch of funny capital A’s with little hats  all throughout the text of every post. And that sucks.

This blog now, along with Rumble Strips, lives in the don callaway dot org (dcdo) Wordpress Mu installation configured with top level domains and sub-domains.   To the casual observer these are standalone Wordpress blogs.  For each blog with a top level domain I can also have multiple blogs as sub-domains to that blog.

Sweet.

I finally cut power to the Dell Poweredge 6300 last night at about midnight, right before I went to bed.  It is so quiet in the TheGarage this morning I can’t hear myself think.  I bet I’ll get readjusted in no time.

I have made some changes to the doncallaway dot org domain. The top level domain, doncallaway.org (dcdo)  now points to a Wordpress Mu blog and serves a static splash page that points to all my other stuff.  The splash page is quite simple at the moment but I will be setting up the BDP-RSS Aggregator plugin to replace the simple linkage with fancy aggregated RSS feeds. For a great example of what you can do with BDP-RSS plugin, check out the Edublogs site.

This blog along with several other blogs will be migrated into the dcdo Mu database today using a top level domain configuration, meaning that garagetechblog.com will still point to this blog. However, if you were linking here from doncallaway.org, which has been pointing here since I shut down the Domino web server running on the Poweredge, you need to change your bookmark. Please.

After I finish moving a couple of blogs into the dcdo Mu environment, I am going to move the Gulf Coast Texas Blog into the Gulf Coast Texas Bloggers Mu database. It’s ridiculous not to. Just like how not allowing embed tags in Mu is ridiculous. I am going to make the hack and we will have embeded video in the GCT Mu installation and the dcdo Mu installation since they are both relatively closed systems.  I don’t recommend the hack for wpmu systems open to the public.

For many days now I’ve been doing a lot of hacking to get Wordpress Mu and the Revolution Lifestyle theme set up the way I want and this has caused me to become very unhappy with WinSCP. The problem may not even lie with WinSCP but with 1an1 but either way my session is timing out every minute or so. Grrr!

I downloaded the latest version WinSCP to see if it can maintain a session longer but I am not optimistic. I think the problem is the host. It’s always something, no?

I’ve been several weeks working here in TheGarage on a lot of administrative and technical stuff related to my vast publishing empire, the main focus of which lately has been Gulf Coast Texas Outdoor Magazine. Before reviving this blog, I discussed briefly here the long list of stuff that has had me occupied.  While there is much left to do, the main items that I am trying to get finished by COB Friday, and hopefully earlier, are:

• Finalize the Wordpress mu installation, which is dependent on the next item
• Finish simplifying my theme customizations so they can be easily applied to new blogs when added to WPMU. This includes updating to the latest Lifestyle theme that I use as a template
• Finish decommissioning the Dell 6300
• Upgrade the Magazine to Wordpress 2.7
• Re-theme this blog
• Move the Gulf Coast Texas Blog into the Wordpress mu database. I may keep it in its own Wordpress installation for a while in which case I need to upgrade it to version 2.7.

I’ve about got all this stuff done. The second bullet is the only hard thing left. After I complete this list I will be at a good stopping point and can go back to a schedule that allows for a little bit of quality time outside everyday.

Some of the stuff I plan on working on next week:

• Integrating the new wireless microphones into my video kit
• Setting up a test bench with  some wireless video cameras I have in a box somewhere so the Outdoor Magazine can have bayou cams this summer
• Knock out some administrative stuff and finish business plan

The little bit of work that I did on the Gulf Coast Texas business plan a couple of weeks ago was sufficient to point out the tasks that needed to be completed before moving on to next goals. I can’t say enough about the need to make and continually refine a business plan. Whenever you aren’t sure what to do next, work on your business plan for a day or so and the next steps will stick out like a sore thumb.

I’ve been fighting with Wordpress MU all day. I’ve installed it five times if I’ve installed once.  The problem turned out to be that you can’t install WPMU in a sub-directory off a directory that has an existing Wordpress installation, as discussed here.

I finally got the beast beat down and was able to at last set up a new test blog. Unfortunately, this means I now have two more blogs to theme out like the the rest of the Gulf Coast Texas site, which is kinda the purpose of the whole exercise I guess. While I am moving the Gulf Coast Texas Blog theme over to the new WPMU blogs, I will document all the global customizations along with site specific customizations so they can be easily duplicated when setting up new blogs. When I have all my css modifications I can put them in a custom css sheet along the lines descibed here.

We kinda had a direction change at work and the business objects were put on hold.  It’s hard to write about high tech stuff when I am not actually doing any high tech stuff. Seems like business is picking up a bit though I don’t think the business objects are back on the table for now. But there has been an item or two of interest pop up from time to that I can discuss.

But right now I want to point out something that I came across that I didn’t know about and want to pass along.  I don’t do a lot of Windows API programming but when the need arises it’s nice to have some tools to ease the way along. Detours is billed as “instrumentation” and basically provides a wrapper for Win32 and Win64 API calls and for injecting custom code into existing libraries. Code injection  allows code maintenance without having to redo, or even have access to, the existing source code. I haven’t downloaded the trial version yet to look at the API but I could see this product literally saving some poor programmers life.

Coming up next I’ll show you how to replace 30 pages of custom .NET code with less than three pages of T-SQL and discuss the reasons why my way is the better way.

I noticed over the weekend that my domain dcdo isn’t working. The tip off was that I wasn’t getting any spam in my inbox. How likely is that not to happen, really? Ping returns the new IP address but doesn’t reply. Probably some further adjustment to the DNS records needs to be made.

I haven’t taken the time to mess with the DNS issues because I haven’t been here much except for on weekends and this past weekend I was busy trying to figure out how to run WordpressMU; the multi-blog, mult-user version of the software I am running now. This is a key step in the process of changing my infrastructure from Domino to hosted WordPress. It wont be any fun maintaining and posting to a half-dozen or so blogs that each have a seperate installation.

Like on the other thing I got it working half-assed but then I had to keep tinkering with it to make it work how I want it too. The closest configuration I found as a model was from Dan Frey at the Office of the Provost Web Team blog at the University at Buffalo:

“Our situation is interesting, but I would not call it unique. We have a server that has multiple domains pointed at it. We installed MU in a directory off of the root of our server, /wordpressmu. Our default domain name is ugly – the idea was that we wanted folks to be able to go to nicedomain.buffalo.edu and get to their blog on our server.

Easier said than done…

Yep pretty much what I’ve found out. My situation is the same except I want to point any domain to any blog regardless of where the blog is and regardless of where the domain is. This is what I have so far:

I know the symlinks are the way to go and that’s how I found Dan Frey’s article–by Googling wordpress mu symbolic link. I’m pretty sure Dan has it figured out I just have to tinker with it some more.

But dang I can’t mess around with it forever. It’s one of those deals that I’ll have to revisit after I get a few other things worked out, like my damn mailserver at dcdo.

I still have some work to do on the infrastructure changes I’ve been making over the last several weeks. First, let me recap what I’ve done so far.

I bought a hosted account where I have ample space on a Linux server. I can use the provider’s packaged services or I can load my own. I am using the MySQL service and phpMyAdmin utility which is provided with the account, including up to fifty databases. Each database can only be 100 MB so that may have to be upgraded eventually.

I passed on the blogging software offered by 1and1.com and loaded Wordpress for my content management system. As a test I saved several categories of technical and business related blog posts from incongruities as .xml files that I could then import into Wordpress. Wordpress did a pretty good job of importing those articles considering I know the xml was not well-formed.

After the import process worked so well on the test I decided to move my blogs and point my domains to 1and1.com. I activated this blog first and it was a simple affair because I bought the domain name from 1and1.com.

Then I set out to move incongruities from Domainsite’s DNS servers with as little work as possible. The first idea, which was the simplest and one I should probably have skipped because it didn’t work, was to forward the domain name to 1and1 with a masked URL, meaning that the URL would still start with my domain name after the request was forwarded to the new address.

I got that configuration working but only half-assed, then I somehow trashed it completely. At that point I went back to what was probably the best simple option which was to change the DNS entries of incongruities to point to 1and1. After doing that I set up a virtual host entry in my apache configuration at 1and1 and pointed it to my webspace directory holding the Wordpress installation for incongruities.

All the while this is going on I am switching my internet provider here at the house. I finally have a high speed cable connection that knocks the old DSL in the dust which means I have a new IP address here in the garage. To complete that change I had edit the A and MX DNS records for doncallaway.org to point to the new IP. My web server and mail server here in TheGarage will still be handling http and SMTP requests for doncallaway.org.

In summary, so far I have installed Wordpress on a remote host, converted and moved two blogs and one website to the remote host along with the MySQL databases that go with the blogs, and I have switched Internet service providers at the house. Though it doesn’t sound like much, it has taken my spare time over the course of several weeks to accomplish.

FINAL GOALS:

I still have at least three blogs and a substantial photo gallery to move to the hosted environment. One of the blogs is in Blogger and the other two are here in TheGarage. Of the two here in TheGarage, one is a photoblog so I have to figure out how to move all the images with the appropriate linkage.

After I finish all that I will have totally redone the way I operate my vast publishing empire. Only archives and backups… and a sandbox, oh and a mail server will remain here in TheGarage. Everything else will be hosted off site.

I will have bandwidth. I will have uptime. I will have industry standard software. I will be taking a big doo in high cotton.

One of the by-products of this move is that I will be able to decommission a few pieces of aging equipment that should have been put to pasture years ago–most notably the relic Dell Poweredge 6300 workhorse. Even though the Dell would make the perfect sandbox it is just too big, too noisy, too hot, and too expensive to operate. In other words it will make a perfect boat anchor as well.

It’s snappy, that’s for sure.

CMA never did correct the problem. I’m sure once they get it corrected my gear wont work anymore. Turns out they bind the MAC address of the device connected to the cable modem with an IP address and even though I purchased a static IP that will never change, my router still has to use DHCP to acquire the IP from the provider. No problem. The problem is that they set up the wrong MAC address so the cable guy calls in and has them change the MAC address to use which would fix the problem. Then I’m told changes to the MAC addresss can take up to 24-48 hours. I’m like what?

Anyway it still wont work with the settings they emailed to me yesterday (like I am supposed to get an email on Internet that doesn’t work) but I have rigged it up so it will work.

I was able to plug the cable modem into a network port on a PC and let the cable modem automatically configure  the network connection. Then I looked at the properties for the connection and wrote down the IP configuration, notably the MAC address that was being reported.

I then plugged the cable modem back into the router and instructed the router to use the MAC address I specify when communicating with the cable modem.

Bingo. So when, or if, they ever change the setting at CMA, my connection will go dead and I’ll have to change my router’s configuration again. I bet a dollar it never gets changed. They was just gonna leave a brand new paying customer without service until I raised hell. All because they don’t really know what they are doing.