What the hell, WordPress?! Look at this shit. LOOK AT IT. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I’m afraid to upload pictures to you now.
Okay now that that’s out of my system I can explain why all my previous posts are currently filled with broken image links.
I decided on a whim I wanted to try to install a dedicated server to play Ark with my friends, on the personal web server that also happens to host this blog. So I tried, and found I had been running with a very outdated version of the Gnu C library. Okay, let’s just run a package update. Wait, my kernel is how old? Upon further inspection it looks like the “long term stable” version of Debian Linux I was running had gone out of date a while ago and wasn’t really taking updates. Oops.
So, no problem, I’ll just upgrade in-place to the latest Debian. What do you mean, I have unmet dependencies. For the update. I find out later that I was trying to skip a generation of releases (that’s how out of date I was) and just trying to automagically update wouldn’t work. And attempting to force it had…consequences. In that I now had wildly conflicting packages running around. Web server is down, PostreSQL database is unrecoverable (there goes the calendar), MySQL database (my blog) is reachable but not through the web interface.
Okay. Abandon ship.
I still have the external hard drive. I managed to dig up the commands I needed to export and backup the MySQL table for the blog contents. Copy those over. Don’t need the media, I have the originals already. Copy major config files for the web server. Copy anything I left in the home directory. Let the rest burn. Download the latest Debian install, shove it on a USB drive and start fresh and new. Reinstall apache, MySQL, and wordpress. Restore the database.
Okay. As you can tell by the fact that you’re reading this, it mostly worked. But if you navigate to any of my previous posts you’ll see that I was clearly wrong when I thought I didn’t need to back up the media. Not that it would have helped. You see, when you upload pictures to a wordpress site, it silently goes and resizes them, and then renames them to include the resolution of the resized picture. So the original file names are not good enough. Ouch. And, between versions, they seem to have changed the resolutions they use, so re-uploading the originals won’t work either. Ouch.
I think I can fix this, but it’ll take a lot of Perl. Yay. Problems spawning problems.
Why am I writing all of this? I mean I doubt anybody is going to discover my silly blog, try to re-read my posts from years ago, see all the broken links, and throw up their hands in disgust if I don’t provide a reasonable explanation. No, there’s a greater lesson here. This is part of the risk I assume when I go with the roll-your-own approach. I could have just created an account on wordpress’ main site and let them host it. But then it isn’t mine. This way, I get to own it.
But it also means I have to deal with this bullshit. You think I had spare time to spend hours trying to repair a borked operating system to get my 2-readers-a-year blog back online? And during the downtime my personal calendar didn’t work either, because I decided to run that myself too. I think I missed a doctor’s appointment or something. I shudder to consider what it would have been like if I had decided to run my own email on the server as well.
It’s all well and good to think about taking back our data from centralized third parties. But nothing is free, and nothing is easy. It becomes a very harrowing cost-benefit analysis of privacy versus convenience, and I’m starting to wonder if the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the fence.