23-Dec-2014

Forced restart
Not because it was needed for some reason, but the power dropped for a second and that’s something the hardware couldn’t handle…Since my disks are still not directly attached to the server, an automated restart will not occur: the disk server is far too slow for the server so it will fail to reach the system disk…Well, I’m at home so it’s easy to get the stuff running again. Just a few minutes offline – mainly because the disks are found in an unclean state so need to be verified – a process that takes some time.
But we’re up again.
WordPress update investigation
So I built up this Cent-OS 6 based system: Leona using an old PC. Installed MySQL, WP versions from 2.6.5 (my current one) to 3.8.1 (the latest I have set up), in order to do the transitions on that machine. But to investigate the databases, I also installeed MySQLWorkbench, but getting a dump of the database onto the machine was troublesome. Tried to setup VSFTPd on Leona, both as a client and a server, but moving files directly between Diana and Leona failed. So by using Helena, my Windows workstation, as an intermediate, I copied the script to an USB stick, switched system and read it into Leona. So I was now able to recreate the database and all blogs I needed, and next ran a reverse-engineer job to get the structure of the databases. Not all, of course, just the ones I used to check the WordPress installations, and thw SYSMGR blog. It turned out that the strcuture of teh database is the same, but I still have to check wether the basic data is as well – by examining the WP26 and WP30 databases.
If these are compatible, there seems to be no problem moving on.
However, the latest version (4.1) needs to be examined too, and if that one is compatible as well, I’ll do the transition in one go: Install WP 4.1 (must be done manually unless I set up the VMS box as if it were a Linus one – possible, but not what I want), and update directly. Next step will the be update PHP to 5.3 (or higher if that is available). And have a look to MariaSQL – a really free forl of MySQL, ported by Mark Berryman.
But that is next.