I’m Back, and I’m Drinking Liberally To Celebrate 0

At Tangier, 18th and Lombard, Philadelphia, at 6 p. m.

Briefly speaking, my database went kerfluie. My two or three regular readers will remember a short period during which posts were appearing twice.

It mysteriously started and mysteriously went from every post to occasional posts. I checked the database using the admin tools, and they found nothing wrong, but I think that was when the problems started.

You will note that I’ve had to drop back quite a while to find a valid backup. I did try to muscle the current database into MySQL, but it was too far gone.

I don’t kid myself that my drivel is all that important, but I apologize to those who have put time and energy and thought into comments and whose comments are gone.

I’m still have some tweaking to do and you may see some minor changes in performance over the next few days, but pretty much what you see is what you’re gonna get.

For the geekily inclined, the gory details are below the fold.

When the blog broke, I decided, what the hey! I’ll upgrade the OS on the server.

I had just received a copy of Slackware 12.1 from the Slackware Store. Now there is no difference between Slackware from the Slackware Store and Slackware you download and burn to CD yourself. All that the Slackware Store does is help support Pat.

It seemed to install okay, but, on reboot, LILO loaded and then . . . nothing. Nada. Zilch. It was as if the kernel didn’t make it to the hard drive. I’d had trouble before installing earlier versions of Slack–the CD drive didn’t see the CDs at all, whether they were mine or Pat’s.

So I figured it was the Same Old Problem. I cruised over to LQ and grabbed Mandriva.

I still had Mandriva on my webserver, because, the first time I tried to install Slack 12.1 on it, it didn’t work. (Oddly enough, I tried to upgrade that box from 10.2 to 11.0, then to 12.0, and it flat out refused to see the CDs–not just my CDs, but also Pat’s.)

I got it running without too much trouble, threw the website back on line, stuck an index.html page in place in the blog subdirectory so people would know I hadn’t just gone away, then spent the week racking up some billable hours.

Sunday, I broke Mandriva. Or it broke my computer, or something.

I had a SCSI disk in it with a Windows NTFS from when the server was was a Windows Domain Controller many years ago. I wanted to blow it away and make it ext3. As root, I entered “cfdisk” on the command line, just as I would have done with Slackware, and got “Doh! What are you talking about?”

Then I tried their fancy smancy “Configure Your Computer–>Local Disks” tool.

To add insult to injury, it wouldn’t let me reformat the whole darned drive–I think that, because it was a left-over WinNT NTFS format, Mandriva thought there was a Windows OS on it (I don’t have any dual boot computers) and wanted to hide the files (which were Linux files, BTW), rather than blow away the entire drive.

All it did, after a half hour of struggling–half an hour, half a blankety-blank hour of trying to figure that graphical monstrosity out, and I know a little bit about computers–was move the bleedin’ boot flag from hda1 to sda1, which, natch, had no OS on it.

At least, when I rebooted, I didn’t get the BSOD.

It was white.

Okay, thinks I, I’ll reinstall this turkey.

Wait a minute, thinks I, let’s shove this Slack 12.1 CD straight from the Slackware Store in there and see what happens this time. Didn’t work the first time, but as my old boss used to say, when it’s completely broke, you can’t break it any more by trying to fix it.

Man, if a Slackware salesman–if there were such a thing–had been sitting there running a demo, you couldn’t have asked for a smoother install. An hour after it was done, I had LISa and Samba working, I was networked to $$$$ printer jacked into my son’s the Family Windows box, I had the firewall going, and my website (but not the blog) back up.

Today, I finally had the time to get it going. The configuration was still there, but three and a half months of posts and almost two or three hours of thought were lost.

All I have to do now is rescue my blog (all this reinstalling started when the mysql database developed a bad case of “I don’t like you anymore”) and I’ll be fully functional tomorrow.

I’m back to being all Slack and all happy.

It always works, it never crashes, and it never ad libs.