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January 15, 2007
We're up and running
I may finally have the blog back up and running OK.
I've lost some comments and one entry.
Addressing the comments, I'd like to thank Rob for wishing me well with respect to the software upgrade. I'd like to assure Lady Penelope that it is my intention to get the kitchen cleaned this evening. And I'd like to let Dave know that part of the problem I had, I think, was similar to the link problem he had during the Movable Type upgrade he implemented back in April 2006. At least that was part of the problem.
Like I said before, the Linux-distribution part of the server upgrade went very well. And it seemed like the Movable Type portion was, initially, smashingly successful too; easier than I'd expected.
The first problem I noticed was that some internal links quit working. For example, the link Sam's Stool quit working and kicked up an error page. Some research showed that the link pointed to:
http://www.delmer.com/archives/2006/12/we_are_filthy_beasts.php
which is, in fact, the page that should have come up. However, the original link was
http://www.delmer.com/archives/2006/12/we_are_filthy_b.php.
So, during the upgrade, something had gone wrong. I recalled that Dave had had some sort of link problem and took a look at the Blogography Archives.
I could tell by looking at my links what the problem was, but I didn't know how it was caused until the visit to Blogography. The keyword was "basename." Dave described the problem, I remembered seeing a setting and found it on one of the configuration pages. I set the value from 30 to 15, which should have shortened the length of the link from 30 to 15 characters, and then rebuilt the site a couple of times. It didn't change anything.
As it happens, I dropped the MySQL tables this morning and recreated them all. It wasn't until I logged in to Movable Type that I realized I'd reinstalled 3.33 instead of 3.31. What the hell I thought, let's see what happens. I put in the settings I use and changed the basename length before importing my blog entries. All of the links worked. Sweet.
Unfortunately, another problem persisted.
Right now, if you were to click on the January 8 using calendar in the right sidebar you'd see:
Because Sixty-Three is the entry from January 7th and Next Tale of Nextel is the one from January 9th.
So -- you'd get links to Yesterday, Main and Tomorrow
After the install of 3.33 I'd get Yesterday, Main, and The Most Recently Added Blog Entry.
Prior to dropping and recreating the MySQL tables I'd had the above problem. After dropping and recreating and reimporting and using the default templates the problem remained. It may be soooo easy to fix, I don't know, I wasn't interested in that this morning.
Another problem I had, and this came after deciding to downgraded from 3.33 to 3.31 was that when I went to tweak my templates I got this error:
maketext doesn't know how to say: _SYSTEM_TEMPLATE_SEARCH_TEMPLATE as needed at lib/MT.pm line 855
I found that others had had the problem but I didn't find any solutions.
After getting that I did a total blowout of MT and reinstalled from scratch; the problem persisted. It wasn't until I dropped all the MySQL tables and started totally over that it went away.
I'm not bitching about Movable Type here. I didn't take the most scientific approach to my install -- I more or less expected it to work without any problems and applied a past-upgrade approach to the process. So, I didn't do a lot of pre-upgrade reading aside from the notes I've kept from past upgrades.
Also, I did a brand-new install ... not an upgrade. Maybe an upgrade install would have kept the links from breaking.
It had to be me. An incremental upgrade from 3.31 to 3.33 shouldn't be a problem. (The Yesterday, Main, Tomorrow thing is still a puzzler and had that not reared it's ugly head I'd be on 3.33 now.)
Maybe I did something early on, that I've forgotten about, that screwed me later. At some point, you know when you're beat and it's coming upon 4 a.m., you take a scorched-earth approach to your data and throw anything you can think of at it; it isn't really the best way to perform engineering or software upgrading.
Had I not been reconfiguring the server -- I added twice the storage with mirrored drives and upgraded the Linux distro -- I never would have changed my MT.
Problems I encountered outside of MT were:
At one point I forgot which version of MT I'd been using. A trip to Archive.org revealed 3.31 was what I'd had.
The new Linux distribution handles .htaccess differently than the old package and I wasn't prepared for that.
The only version of MT 3.31 I had was a Windows zipped version. When I moved it to the server none of the file permissions I needed were set and I had to do those by hand.
Things I did right:
I have a data dump of the MySQL database.
I have a MoveableType export.
I have copies of all my templates.
Mostly, I just backed everything up pretty well. (I did read up on this before doing anything stupid.)
How Long Did I Piddle Around ...
... trying to sort everything out, getting links to work, upgrading and downgrading? Because I was too stubborn (stupid) to give up and drop some tables?
Hours.
I upgraded Linux Thursday night ... I started the MT on Friday and put in 5 hours on it. Saturday morning a couple of hours and then from ... no, I had dinner with a female friend ... 10:30 p.m. to 4 a.m. was 5.5 hours. Sunday morning a couple of hours ... Sunday night from 7 p.m. until midnight.
Oh, 19 hours.
Finally: How Long Does It Take ...
... to drop all the tables, recreate them, reinstall 3.31 from old notes and set file permissions manually and reimport the MoveableType data.
Less than an hour.
Posted by delmer at January 15, 2007 4:00 PM