2024/05/03
The idea here is to have a place where I can just do autistic infodumps on Whatever Has Been Going on, regardless of topic. Skip the ones that interest you not! There shall be no malice.
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Other Stuff
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The Latest Tedious Tech Saga: Background and Updates
About a month ago, I had made enough progress on VbzCart that I was ready to post a partially-working demo. I wanted to use Statler (our home server) for it, but I've been writing in the latest version of PHP (which, until this week or so, was v8.2) and Statler was still running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS which only has v8.1 or so, and some of the stuff I had written wouldn't work -- so I thought okay, I'll force an upgrade to the latest Ubuntu (which, until last week or so, was 23.10).
That went fine until sometime late in the process when the upgrade encountered some kind of disk error, and the filesystem switched to read-only. The upgrade app said it had completed "with errors", but it couldn't actually be rebooted after that.
Time for another episode of "that's terrific! / that's terrible!":
- (+) I did have regular backups set up, but...
- (-) they did not include a proper SQL dump of the database.
- (+) The database files themselves were (are) still readable -- no data lost...
- (-) ...but I couldn't, of course, boot the disk to run the MySQL server to load those files.
- (+) I have, on several prior occasions, succeeded in recovering MySQL databases just by copying the wanted files from the MySQL data folder on the dead server (or backup thereof) to the MySQL data folder on a working/live server.
- (-) My initial attempts to do this did not work.
So I set up a new Hetzlet (VPS on Hetzner[1]) -- like a "droplet" on DigitalOcean) specifically for this recovery, since I didn't immediately have another SSD drive handy with which to get Statler back up and running. ...and since Statler had "successfully" upgraded to 23.10, I thought I'd better upgrade the Hetzlet as well, for the best possible DB engine compatibility.
It turns out, however, that VirtualMin can't be installed on 23.10. For the past decade or so, I've been leaning pretty heavily on VirtualMin to help automate setup of virtual domains, but the cracks were starting to show -- CertBot hasn't been working properly for some time, and I'd found myself writing all kinds of config include-files[2] to fix not-quite-rightness in how VirtualMin sets up PHP. I couldn't get those includes to wo so, in the spirit of making sure I never finish anything by introducing a side-quest halfway through, I decided to
Footnotes
- ↑ I've been planning to move from Digital Ocean to Hetzner because the latter came recommended and is also significantly cheaper than DigOc. Recently, there was some concern about Hetzner abruptly cancelling service for another fedi instance - woem.men - with some kind of moral panic excuse about... well, here's what I wrote about it in Discord on March 24:
The story as I understand it is that they're hosted on Hetz, and Hetz had warned them that their account would be suspended if [something] -- and at first they thought the [something] was a specific image, which they removed, but Hetz never acknowledged whether that was it, never acknowledged that they had taken corrective action, and is still threatening to suspend the account. (Much of this is between the lines and not stated explicitly -- which makes me discount it a great deal, because vagueness is often used as a tool for plausible deniability when trying to manipulate sentiment.)
So for now, we're still moving things (including TootCat) there -- but I'm putting a higher priority on automated migration processes, so we can get out again quickly if needed.
- ↑ Shirley there's a way to link to a specific commit in GitLab, but I can't find it. For now, though, until I remove from the "main" branch, they're here.