Flashes of Panic

I moved running-blogs.com again this week. For various reasons to do with server software versions, the new web host wasn’t working, and A’s blogs needed to return to their original host, albeit with the new domain name.

One of the catches here was that in the previous move, we were going from one established (by which I mean, DNS pointing to the appropriate host) domain to another. This time, I was moving from an established domain to one which was not established. This isn’t difficult by itself; there are plenty of ways to move files, and I did spend a good chunk of time synchronizing files between the two hosts.

More problematic was shifting the database. To begin with, I could only access the database at the target host after I’d shifted the DNS. (I had to create a new database, rather than refreshing the old one, due to the domain name change.) This introduced a lag into the transition, which was troublesome but not a crisis; since the sending host was already effectively unusable, having the target host unusable as well wasn’t the end of the world.

The bigger issue was the upper limit on the size of import files to the new database. This host sets a 10MB limit on the size of files which can be imported into its databases; the export file from the running-blogs.com database is on the order of twice that. I tried breaking it into smaller files, with little success; I got the table structure, but large numbers of entries and comments weren’t imported.

Finally, I tried running the export table by table, with one file for each table, and running the import in the same way. The mt_entries table, which holds the actual text of each blog entry, was still prohibitively large (12MB,) so I broke it into two pieces. It still took some time to import; I also spent a chunk of time combing through the files with grep to find links to the old domain and update them. (I didn’t change all of them, since the domain is still in use, but I changed quite a few.)

Once I was satisfied with the database import, I went through and “rebuilt” each blog, which is simple but tedious. I also discovered one thing I should’ve corrected in the database file: the absolute path of the weblog root and the archives is stowed in the database, and when you shift from one host to another, that changes. I’m manually changing it, blog by blog, before the rebuild.

During the course of this, my laptop again began to get significantly hot. This time, I went to the freezer and got out a bag of dried something (corn? peas?) used for icing balky joints, and put the laptop on it. So far, this has helped significantly.

Now Playing: Window from Inarticulate Nature Boy by Josh Clayton-Felt