Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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Arrgh!

567 words

All right. I’ve hit the big suckage of everything software once more. Big time.

The executive summary is that Movable Type sucks. That databases suck and particularly Berkeley DB does so. Web servers do as well. And slow DSL uploads don’t help either.

A more detailed summary might tell you that my Movable Type database is around 70MB for reasons I don’t understand; that our server gave 500 errors because the scripts just died without error messages; for lack of memory; apparently with Bekeley DB they just load everything every time; Everyone suggested upgrading to MySQL, another world of geeky mystery that I had hoped to avoid, but which solves the memory problems; But MT’S sucky upgrade script just failed; So I decided to try again with a version 3.2 install of MT (jup, the one that sucks severely). The update was a pain as usual and for sure it just trashed my databases again! More Googling revealed that this problem is known and requires a slight modification to one of the scripts which some helpful guy provided.

So, hooray, I’m running MT 3.2. Which seems to use even more memory and goes titsup even more frequently. Needless to say that the database upgrade script still fails. Even more Googling and looking around suggests that one of the files is a bit damaged. But how to fix that? No idea. I really wanted to try loads of things. But all of my (not so feeble, I like to think) resources failed: I can’t run the install on my uni account (they don’t have Berkeley DB support according to mt-check.cgi). I can’t run it on my departmental account (no cgis there at all). And I can’t run it on my iBook (apparently Berkeley DB can only read databases that were written with the same endianness).

So alltogether this sucks pretty heavily. More help is on the way but further good advice won’t be turned down as I’m starting to expect the worst by now.

The internet is a junkyard. What should be trivial is very difficult because all programs are buggy and none are compatible. Not even to themselves. People who write software, even those who write for the web always seem to assume that you’re operating in an environment with unlimited resources and access rights. Hint: you’re not.

Thanks for your attention to what I typed into the newsfeed manually and I’ll go to have a drink now…


Update, a day later: Thanks to Steffen’s access to a Linux computer with the ability to actually read my database and thanks to his efforts in helping out, and in a very lengthy and painful operation (gee, I just hate those Linux people, things would’ve been much faster if those damn boxes had a little switch to turn all security considerations off, there are just so many settings to fiddle with to allow this feature in apache or that feature elsewhere. And a for a one-off figuring all of those out was just a waste of time) we managed to free the data from Berkeley DB and move it to SQLite. So the site can run on my iBook now (Yikes! Performance is decidedly unimpressive). However, that’s not sufficient yet. We still need to move that database onto our host’s MySQL server. And I have no idea about that. Let’s hope they’ll be able to help us with that!

January 13, 2006, 23:13

Comments

Comment by Nicholas Riley: User icon

The permalinks in the RSS feed point to 127.0.0.1.

Probably not what you want to hear, but… :-)

January 20, 2006, 18:49

Comment by ssp: User icon

Thanks Nicholas…

actually the pages were just being re-built, but that’s taking a while to complete.

Exactly the kind of problem you won’t see on your own machine.

It should be fine again in a few minutes.

January 20, 2006, 18:50

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