January 2007 – kill-9.it

WordPress 2.0.7 to 2.1 Upgrade – screwed up (almost)

Ok, so I’m writing this down in English, just to avoid everybody the trip to Google Translate. (English translated to Italian sounds funny, but Italian to English is really weird – at least to me)

While upgrading from 2.0.7 to 2.1, the upgrade procedure failed horribly on me with quite a lot of SQL errors. Let me make it clear right now: it is not WordPress guys fault, it’s mine.
The user accessing the database did not have all the permissions needed to upgrade the structure and the content of the tables — so I was left with a half-dead blog.
The live half consisted of the public pages, good.
The dead half was the administrative interface, bad. While the error messages were different (I could distinguish between a successful authentication and a bad password), all I got was the dreaded

“You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

To make a long debug story short: being too lazy to dig inside the WP internals and understand which parts of code were running the authentication, I just choose to guess the tables which may have been screwed up by the limited upgrade. They could not be posts, categories, links, or the like, right?

Did I mention I didn’t make a backup before? (living on the edge :P) All I had was a backup a couple of days old, and I didn’t want to loose the last couple of comments and posts.

Anyway, I decided to bet on

options
users
usermeta

Got them out of the two-days-old SQL dump, and restored them on the half-new database — then run again the upgrade procedure after fixing user privileges on the db.
That’s all, now I have a shiny new admin section working.

MAKE BACKUPS! :)

Fastweb, o il TCP reinterpretato

Dall’interno della loro rete tra le 2100 e le 2200 di stasera, a tratti:

Connessione ad una porta chiusa:

beepbeep:~ zen$ telnet host 1
Trying ip…
Connected to host.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
telnet> quit
Connection closed.

Connessione ad una porta sicuramente aperta, ma non http:

beepbeep:~ zen$ telnet host porta
Trying host…
Connected to host.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
Connection closed by foreign host.

Connessione ad una porta a cui risponde un httpd:

beepbeep:~ zen$ telnet www.kill-9.it 80
Trying 88.149.151.30…
Connected to calvin.kill-9.it.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
GET / HTTP/1.0
[enter]
wait… wait… wait…

Divertente.
Ok, adesso che rifunziona tutto, faccio l’upgrade alla 2.1.

Sono (quasi) tornato.

Ho finalmente trovato tempo e voglia di rimettere online il sito. Anche questa volta, le cose non sono state semplicissime: nell’attesa di trovare la macchina definitiva che possa ospitarlo senza schienare l’hardware su cui si trova, vi offro queste pagine da una smagliante Ultra1 Enterprise che sfoggia:

CPU UltraSPARC @ 167 MHz (cpu0: 32K instruction (32 b/l), 16K data (32 b/l), 512K external (64 b/l))
192Mb di RAM
9Gb di disco SCA 10k giri
l’inossidabile NetBSD

la quale, nonostante l’eta`, si comporta ancora ottimamente (un grazie a Paolo per il lease, la mia Ultra5 non partiva piu`) e che fino a stamane serviva la “pagina di cortesia“.
Certo, ogni tanto ansima leggermente — si perde delle connessioni al database, e mostra qualche altro problemino — ma per qualche tempo andra` bene.

Se siete ancora li` (e almeno qualche feedreader e google passano ancora), grazie per la pazienza — ma davvero sentivo il bisogno di prendermi una pausa.
Un particolare ringraziamento al CCFARSK-9, che mi ha dato la spinta finale a rimettere in piedi le due cose che servono per servire queste pagine.