Success With The Database

Thursday August 16, 2007

It's been an incredibly F'ed up interesting month over here but there may finally be some success to report. Allow me to summarize the nightmares experienced.

To start it off I ran out of disk space at my webhost (due to being a cheap ass with a cheap ass package). Well guess what happens when you're writing to a Berkeley Database and you run over your quota? Corrupted everything. There's really no way to recover from this outside of reinstalling and rebuilding everything. So, I figure it would be a great idea to upgrade my movabletype while I'm at it. The newer version looks much better anyway. Oops, with cheap shared hosting your CPU and memory usage is throttled and the new version won't even run. Sweet, more wasted time! So I decide maybe I can use some crazy perl script to go in and fix these Berkeley Databases. WRONG. Then out of nowhere my website won't load. Error 500 for any PHP page. Oddly enough images, HTML pages, and anything NOT PHP will load without issue. Tech support in the Philippines basically refuses to believe this. "Did you read the FAQ?"...please, just stab a ball point pen into my eye immediately. Guess what, after a couple angry calls, sitting on hold, and emails the site randomly works again. Thanks, geniuses.

Final decision was to simply use the old version of movabletype, reinstall it, and I'm going to have to do some .htaccess trickery to forward any links to my old pages to the new ones, since the URLs were all based on internal database IDs (terrible decision) and now they're all different. Also, we're now on MySQL so hopefully this nightmare will never happen again. Never allow a Berkeley Database near your data.