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.

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 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.