Day: May 15, 2009

Blog’s Back

It’s way past 2am and I solved most of our problems – the blog is back and so are all of my client’s sites… Major disaster avoided. No the Keiki Blog does not look that pretty at the moment, and not all features are activated, but every other domain (and I have over 20 running from the same package) is just perfect.

The Baby Blog and Andy’s A Kauai Blog were sharing a database, like siamese twins who share some region of the brain (and I could not get Andy to allow me to upgrade his limping blog for a long time **HINT** **HINT**) I think there reason for the problem was that the shared database of the Kauai blog and the Keiki Blog (yes, got a name change too, no more Baby…) got spammed to the point that it grew too big, so all the blog software failed, and caused the servers to refuse to deal with any of my websites <geek>12+ hanging cgi processes and cpu quotas exceeded</geek>

The last thing that one of the spammers tried to insert into our database caused a problem, because the – overfilled – database quit in the middle of adding whatever viagra or refinance advertisement and did not work at all from then on. Even after 1and1 restored the order on the other domains <geek>killed the hanging processes</geek> the baby blog would not come back to life, none of its admin components worked.

I then seperated the siames twins Kauai blog and Baby blog and it required some neurosurgical skills…I did a backup of the database, deleted all the spam, and split the kauai from the babyblog and upgraded everything to the newest standards. It was the equivalent from Windows 3.11 or maybe MSDOS to Windows XP. Or maybe take a car, replace the engine, the chasis, the interior… until all you have left are the same passengers. I was actually surprised how easy it was, compared to some of the smaller upgrades, from 2.5.1 to 2.6 was just about the same amount of work… not really, but all in all it was less than 4 hours and most of the time went into figuring out what the problem was (1and1 for once was really unhelpful)

I think I wrote this mainly for my own info… congrats if you read and understood it all. (And I must be more coherent than usually at 2am)