Well, that was certainly unpleasant!
To recap for those of you who don’t follow me directory on the social networks, or who might not have seen me reporting: this past weekend, Dara and I had to completely overhaul our web server. This was basically the same operation we had to do LAST month on the mail server: i.e., completely flatten the box and reinstall a fresh install of the operating system, and then rebuild all our data on it.
What brought this on? My trying to do a WordPress security update, and discovering that the server’s root password no longer worked. Pro tip: that’s bad.
So yeah. Cue emergency server maintenance and tearing my hair out trying to figure out the safest way to reconstruct both my WordPress sites: annathepiper.org and angelahighland.com. I THINK my sites are now both back up again, after I did a completely fresh install of WordPress AND a fresh install of necessary themes and plugins, and then restored the old tables out of the database and the old media to populate both sites.
So if y’all are reading this, do me a favor: please browse around on both annathepiper.org and angelahighland.com, and let me know if anything looks broken.
Known issues on annathepiper.org:
* Clicking on the flickr galleries on the GBS pictures I have there is borked, but that was borked before all this happened;
* The RP logs archive pages there aren’t working yet either
I am not currently aware of anything actively broken on angelahighland.com, but if you see something that looks wacky, please let me know immediately! Especially if it’s on any of the higher level pages for my various books.
If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, go talk to Dara and let her know too if anything looks wacky on crimeandtheforcesofevil.com.
Still to do: I need to reconstruct and restore the other WordPress blogs we host, most of which will be rolled together into a single WordPress install to minimize the number of access points onto our system. This impacts baconforbirds.com (which we WILL be bringing back online by Paul’s request even if he’s not actively working on the site right now), upcc.org, uplakekenmore.org, and emeraldforestfilk.org. I will also be looking into converting lexfa.org into a WordPress blog to add to the aforementioned single install.
Any questions, talk to me!
