Feels like I have not done this in a long time. The .MOBI. A moderately severe server blowout cost me a week of heavy lifting, reviving web sites and throwing some out. This was nowhere near as big a deal as the blowout of 5 or 6 years ago, which I eventually traced to China. This time I have no fucking clue what happened but I am satisfied with my preparation for such a calamity. I had enough redundancies in place that I managed to lose virtually no data. But it is no less a pain in the ass to deal with these things.
The fun started last Sunday, when I woke up to a message that my server was in “Rescue Mode.” I’d never heard of that but it’s something like Safe Mode in Windows, I guess. A limited OS and all my files saved via the RAID. But the files had to be copied, and since the data center throttles its bandwidth my lightning-fast Fios connection gave no real benefit. So I leased a backup server, which took several hours to get going, and I copied the important sites over there and pointed to the new IP addresses.
The details of this debacle are too numerous to enumerate. I have no idea what happened to cause this, which leads me to think that it will probably happen again. I’ve been at this data center for a year and nothing bad had happened until now. I’ve been combing through everything from deep-level config and ini files to robots.txt and eye-glazing mod-rewrite rules to adapt to a new file system. The big revelation has been how head and shoulders cPanel is over DirectAdmin. Somehow, years ago, I just blindly chose DA as my web site control panel. I don’t really need those things, as I can edit config files just fine. But they do make things easier. Only gripe so far about cPanel over DA is that the latter made customizing virtual hosts a lot simpler, even as it threw a meaningless error message any time I used it. cPanel insists you edit include files on the server, but its documentation incorrectly identifies the location for those include files. So that took some figuring out but eventually I got all my mod_rewrite rules back in place. I have a thing for putting root level subdirectories in lettered directories. It’s a tidiness thing I came up with long ago, because I have so much stuff and I like having a clean directory structure that runs deeper than it looks. So sorabji.com/college_point is physically located at /public_html/c/college_point, and the config file tells apache to rewrite the directory to excise the /c/. So many pesky little details like this make reviving my web sites anything but simple.
Now it looks like I might have to give up on swish-e, my favorite site search program since forever. Their web site is gone and I cannot figure out how to compile it on a 64-bit system, even though I appear to have done that before. That sucks because I loved having my own site search. Will have to look about for another. I cannot get Swish++ to install, either. Swish-e was used to index etudemagazine.com, the USPS Mailbox Locator, wordswarm, and other sites I am probably forgetting.
I also had unique problems getting Menalto Gallery2 to wake up. I kept getting a “Security Violation” but none of the standard search results addressed my issue. It stems from my integration of Gallery2 with Movable Type, an integration I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else attempt. Long story short I created a symlink in the Gallery2 template directory that linked to a directory filled with .txt files under the etude content. That symlink used the full file system path, which is now different. So basically Gallery2 was trying to include a couple of text files that it could not find, and that was all it took to crash the entire fucking program with an inexplicable “Security Violation” that recorded nothing to any of the relevant error_logs.
Blahblahblah. Nobody cares. I heard from a few people that they could not access my sites, but it’s been a holiday week and unlike years past that means traffic slowed. It used to be my biggest traffic time of the year. It is a measure of how far I have come from giving a fuck about anything that when the server blew up I barely got upset. I was focused and Zen about it all, not that this week has been without its mind-squeezing frustrations.
…
I had a great night out with an old friend last night. This was after a day spent walking 11.2 miles, according to a mapping tracker app. That app also said I reached a maximum speed of 44mph, which does not sound possible since I never got on a bus or train. So maybe the mileage number is whack, too. It was an awesome walk, though, one for the ages, and I had my DSLR for the first time in a while. Too bad all three of the batteries I had in my bag quickly went from full to empty. I hope that’s just a fluke for having not used them in a while, but more than that I hope it’s not a sign that the camera is crapping out.
I ended up in a dumpy part of Glendale. I’d been there before, on 69th Street on the other side of Queens Boulevard. But I managed to find streets that were new to me. I look at the infinite sequence of houses and yards and imagine all the lives being lived therein. Every one is a mystery, and there is so much of New York I will never know or understand.
Days like yesterday, Christmas Day or New Years Day, are the best for these epic walks. Just wish the camera batteries obliged.
I started on what I wanted to be another epic walk today but gave up on account of the gloomy, soul-deadening weather. Looks like some rain all rest of the week. Boo-hoo.
I told my friend last night about my hospital stay last year. He didn’t know. He is the stock of friend who I would normally have told but I didn’t really tell too many people about all that when it happened. It led to a candid discussion about alcoholism and anti-anxiety pills, the latter of which I believe would have made that $100,000 hospital adventure unnecessary had I known they existed. The benzos…
I guess I can’t say that. I needed a full detox, and what else are they going to do but run every test in the book on me. I had mostly put that episode out of my mind but it’s scary to think now how close I might have come to killing myself. But, again, I don’t worry about it. Memories of the incontinent elderly geezer with whom I shared the hospital room came back in full 1080p.
I heard myself talking to another friend a couple of weeks ago. I mean, I heard myself. I was making excuses like a textbook alcoholic, explaining and flat-out lying about my intake. I am fine with it, though. I am what I am. I remember a long time ago overhearing a woman say that if you are an alcoholic that never leaves you. You could live on a desert island and not have a drink for the rest of your life but you would still be an alcoholic. I thought it was kind of a mean-spirited comment when I first heard that years and years ago, but I think of it now and I’m like yeah, that makes sense.
I am not out of the woods yet web-server-wise. I had managed to save everything up until hours before the outage, but somehow I uploaded a database from a couple of days earlier. Now I’ve made all kinds of changes to the DB so I’m just going to let those 2 days worth of stuff get away. The .MOBI didn’t work at all until now… and I’m not certain it will work now, but it probably will. I was lacking something called ICONV, whatever the fuck that is and whatever the fuck that does. Somehow in a drunken stoop I managed to get that installed, even though it should already have been present because it’s a default library for any respectable php instance.
So many pesky little details, a blizzard of which no one but I will ever see or know about. A zillion little logins, a zillion little config files and filters that silence a lot of things that are now in my face again. There is this one really obnoxious mailing list I was forcibly subscribed to many years ago. On the previous server I added the from address to a black hole but I have not done that yet, so I see these messages 6 ot 7 times a day. It’s from a guy who basically just sends out headlines and blurbs to news stories written by other people. Every message includes a DONATE NOW button, and of late the person who does this has been adding particularly aggressive demands for money from all the subscribers. He is not doing anything worth spending a dime on and I don’t understand why he’s been doing this for so many years. I guess he must make some coin from it or he wouldn’t bother but who the hell would give money to such a useless and obnoxious resource?
Oh and there is an unsubscribe button on the guy’s web site but it does not work. So many smarmy little ways people out there try to skim a buck from the Internet.
At the ghetto coffee shop. Going home to stare at more access logs and config files.
