Posts tagged with screwup

So, I use Apache Roller as the application my blog runs on. A new version of this has come out (I was on 5.0 and 5.1 has been released) so I decided to upgrade.

This has resulted in the theme I was using breaking, badly, so I have had to move to the basic theme. I can't be bothered to tweak that right now, but I don't like it much either, so I am going to have too eventually. It also appears to have broken rss feeds, such that if you do follow my blog with an rss reader you get all my blog entries again (or at least it does in tiny tiny rss) so sorry about that.

Worse than all that however is the fact that I decided to take this opportunity to update to openjdk-7 (from openjdk-6) and tomcat 7 (from tomcat 6). The server this blog is running on used to be Debian 6, but was dist-upgraded to Debian 7 (which went terribly smoothly at the time) and the older versions of java and tomcat were left over from that. This process was far more laborious than it should have been, largely due to me having forgotten all the steps I had taken to get Roller working on tomcat 6 in the first place (the java upgrade was painless mind, so I did that bit right at least).

It's a good job I'm not getting paid for looking after this server, I'm apparently not doing a very good job of it.

So, my web server was a little out of date, running Debian Squeeze. The HeartBleed vulnerabilty was a bit of a wake up call to get up to date (despite the fact I wasn't vunerable to it because of the server being out of date), and I decided to do a Dist-upgrade.

This went reasonably smoothly, except my customised qmail install isn't allowing me to send email (or more specifically it is, but then generating an error) so I'll need to fix that (I am getting mail though, so not too urgent)

It also broke mysql, and I hadn't taken the time to take backups of the databases before hand! (BIG mistake)

Fortunately I was able to fix that without any data loss.

I then Discovered that it had broken my blog. The data appeared to be in the database, but the blog wouldn't load. I tried taking a backup and reinstalling the blog. This Did not help much. Although that then pointed me in the right direction. The update had removed the mysql connector that I had linked into the tomcat lib folder. So I fixed it by linking the new mysql connector that had been installed as part of the upgrade.

The Biggest fail here being the lack of backups, or contingency planning, particularly given that this is what I do for a living!

OOPS.