The 5-Minute Upgrade From HELL
I just spent the last 2 hours upgrading the MySQL database that hosts one of my California Girls websites. What should have been a simple in place upgrade to fix a couple of potential security exploits turned out to be a nightmare. I’ve done this type of upgrade many times without any problems but today, for some reason, the upgrade reset all of the permissions to the default. (I did not find this out until later, of course.) I had a backup from an hour before it’s never a good idea to restore a backup from an older version on to a newer version. So I spent the what seemed like for ever, but, was really only about 90 minutes, comparing files and database dumps to find out what was changed that should not have been. Ultimately, I just needed to restore two tables but which took les than a minute once I determined what I needed to do. Hosting your own web site is not for the faint of heart. It’s fine if all you serve are pictures of the children, but anything more can be problematical. I try to only take the server down after midnight and keep the outages to less than 5-minutes but that was definitely not the case today. It’s not like the world will come to an end or anything but some citizens in the online community that post there will definitely have noticed the downtime.
Server setup and configuration is one area where California Girl and I don’t quite agree. She freely acknowledges that she’s a user and doesn?t know much about the inner workings of web applications and their underlying software but thinks that since I write software applications for a living, things should be 100% trouble free. She’ll wake up in the morning, check her e-mail, find out that the site was down and ask what the problem was. I’ll explain to her what happened then she’ll ask why it took so long to get things fixed if I had a backup. I’ll explain things in a little more depth, but she’ll think I’m just repeating myself. That will be the end of the conversation. She still won’t be satisfied but won’t think its worth discussing any further.
