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kanna server fiasco
Wednesday, June 1 2016
The first thing I did when I got up this morning was fire up the Subaru to see if the air conditioner clutch would engage on its own when I turned on the AC. Sure enough it did, and it continued to even once the engine had warmed up. That copper wire trick is amazing; think of all the people getting $800 air conditioning jobs when ten minutes, a few inches of wire, and three tiny dabs of epoxy are all they really need. This fix is everything I want in a DIY solution.
After another unremarkable day in the workplace, Gretchen returned from the Wednesday Woodstock Farm Festival with a falafel from Aba's Falafel. It was spicy and contained several big juicy jalapeños. As I devoured this, Gretchen and I watched Jeopardy together for the first time in weeks; normally my work schedule keeps us from our old ritual of dinner & Jeopardy.
This evening there was some problem with a virtual private server (VPS) that I've been using to Bittorrent in a way that won't result in nastygrams from Verizon, to host the site I'd built for one of Gretchen's tiny publishers, and also to host that "game" I'd built for that lazy, uninterested mentee I'd been teaching about web development since November. That mentee was the one who alerted me to the problem; he would have to give a presentation tomorrow of the thing I'd built for him and was understandably concerned about his inability to reach it. I did some investigation and initially it seemed that the problem was that the VPS had run out of drive space, which is a common problem when the drive is only 2.5 gigabytes in size and I'm using it to download 300 MB episodes of Game of Thrones and Terriers. But even after deleting some big files, the server wasn't doing what it should. So I tried rebooting it, and after that it was unreachable. Despite everything I tried on vpslink.com's terrible & poorly-labeled administration interface, the site remained unreachable. It's a ghetto hosting company, with no phone number that can be called and links that seem capable of providing useful administrative functions but that only lead to an ugly web page full of poorly-worded marketing. All I could do was open a trouble ticket and hope for the best. But it was looking increasingly likely that I would have to "reinstall the container," thereby losing all my data.
I had good-enough local copies of that stupid game I'd made for my mentee, so I could reassemble a version of it on asecular.com, which I soon did. But in looking through the places where it should've been, I couldn't find any SQL at all for that website I'd made for Gretchen's tiny publisher. I had its webroot and config files, but none of its data. It appeared as if I'd developed and populated the database entirely on the VPS and had never backed it up. If that was the case, I was going to have to reconstruct the database schema by looking at how it was accessed by PHP. As for the data, the only source for that would be snapshots of the webpages from Archive.org (which is better than nothing).
I happened to be in the worst possible mood for this kind of fiasco. I'd taken a largish dose of tincture of kanna, and it was making me feel unusually impatient and irritable. Indeed, just prior to my discovering the problem with the server, I'd actually told Gretchen I would clean the garage just so I wouldn't have to play Boggle or Scrabble with her. Initially the server fiasco kept me away from the garage, but eventually I went down there in hopes that doing some cleaning would clear my head and improve my mood. And while I was cleaning, I thought of places I could look for a possible backup of that possibly-lost-forever database. Eventually I found a very early copy of the database, which was a huge improvement over the situation I thought I was in. And then something even better happened: the VPS came back up. By then I'd accidentally (and unknowingly) reset the root password because of the terrible vpslink.com control panel interface, so it would take me awhile to clamber out of the hole I was in. But it wasn't nearly as deep as I'd feared. One of the first things I did upon reaching the VPS was to make a fresh backup of that database. Since that publisher rarely changes his site, I probably won't need to make another backup again for years.
According to the trouble ticket, they had to run fsck on my virtual drive. The actual problem (one they probably wouldn't've told me) might've been a failure in the underlying (that is, real) hardware.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160601 feedback
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