The Amazing Dissappearing Website
Some of you (the 5 of you that might care) may have wondered where ol’ WildAndBad has been for the past two weeks. Then again, you may not. I just thought I’d explain.
The quite long-toothed iMac that runs WildAndBad recieved its security update and happily updated by downloading and running the install package. After that it does a system optimization. On an old mac with too little memory this process can take up to an hour. This isn’t unusual. The problem is that during that hour the mac restarted.
It wasn’t planned or forced, it just happened. The result was the GUI would not load. The services (ftp, ssh) loaded and such but nothing else.
So I ssh’ed into the system and copied everything off the system drive to a clunky external drive I have hacked into the system; wiped, then re-installed OS X 10.3 (Panther). Then, I restored everything I had copied off. And…it still didn’t work.
So I did it again, this time being more conservative in my copy-back by only restoring databases, conf files and applications that I knew I needed.
It is currently running {crosses fingers} and the data seems to have come through intact. So now we see if it will continue to run as I piece-by-piece restore the stuff that was deleted.
As I am looking through it there is a lot (and I do mean a lot) of Cruft. I have not cleaned house in a long, long time and it seems I am overdue. All in all, despite two weeks of nail-biting stress over what would be gone forever, I’m happy it has made it through relatively unscathed.