Our MoveableType Installation Should be Renamed StuckTypeLiteracy Weblog)
Drat, drat, drat, and darn! I’m sorry to report that blogs.setonhill.edu is even more busted now; apparently since about noon today it’s been impossible to post new entries. I feel sick to my stomach about the terrible timing — especially for those students whose blogging portfolios are due next week, and even more especially for Karissa (who had hoped to blog her participation in the Miss Pennsylvania contest… I’ve set up a blog entry for Karissa on my site, where I hope she can at least give us updates, but I know it won’t be the same thing).
I’ve been keeping in regular touch with my ISP, who offered to restore the whole blogs.setonhill.edu site the way it was before the errors started happening, but then we would lose a couple days worth of entries — so I asked him to hold off.
Thanks, Will. Hmm… I wish I’d thought of option 4. I actually just finished spending about 2 hours exporting every blog entry to a temporary site… it looks like all the entries except for those entered in the last 36 hours or so are fine, and there were only a handful of entries created since things really started going down the tubes. I was able to retrieve them and can e-mail them to the authors as plain text, for them to re-post if the desire.
My ISP, Dave Cornelson, was starting to import the data I had exported, until he got exhausted and went to sleep about an hour ago (it’s 3am my time as I type this… but I slept in until 10am the previous morning, so I’m actually not yet a zombie). He hasn’t yet given me full privilges on the new installation, though, so I’m kind of stuck for the moment.
Thanks for the tip about SSH…
fyi – If you can actually use telnet to connect to your server your server isn’t exactly secure. Telnet is commonly known as insecure due to it transmitting your password as plain text when you log in. If your host is actually allowing telnet login, that’s a security risk. You should only be able to login using SSH (which is exactly like telnet, only secure).
I’ve read through some of your postings on the movable type site about this problem. How did trying to convert from Berkley DB to MySQL go?
I do have some thoughts on fixing it. Set up a new movable type instance (call it blogs2.setonhill.edu or something). You could:
1. Export everything then import it into the new system and see if that works.
2. Export each blog one at a time, then reimport them, checking between each one to see if things still work.
3. The fast way – just have students post their new entries on the new blogs2.setonhill.edu address. If they need to look at old entries, they can look at the old blogs.seton… address.
4. Even better – set up a new movable type instance at blogs2.setonhill.edu. Import the couple-day-old backup into the new instance. Ask students to use the new url for blogging, and to copy the missing entries/comments over to the new instance if they want to.
What do you think? It sounds like #4 might be your best bet (if export then reimport doesn’t work).