Back online

Boy, that was a long ride. Where have I been, you might ask and you’d be very much entitled to.

It started out with no emails being delivered right after I installed the webbased IMAP emailclient Roundcubemail. It must have altered some settings (even though I don’t suppose it ought to), because the delivery stopped mysteriously right after the install.

I tried tons a things to get these two working together but ended up wrecking my Exim installation.

Then I thought I this was a “perfect” time to upgrade from Ubuntu Hoary to Breezy. I was wrong. First the MySQL package for PowerPC had problems to which I, after much research, found no solution. I’m still not sure if it was the package or the upgrade that broke the database.
I then worked on getting Exim to work again but had no luck. I still don’t know what I did wrong. I was using more or less the same approach and setup as the first time. And Exim has been a very good solution. I tried Postfix and it worked almost “out of the box”. Nice. Email was back and email sendt in the downtime was being delivered from my mx-backup.
No loss, thank god.

By a chance I found that MySQL 4.1 is packaged seperately from 4.0, so I tried that package instead. And it worked. Phew, finally I could continue. Now WordPress told me that MySQL-support was missing in the PHP installation. That was wierd since PHPMyAdmin and Roundcubemail was working. The problem must then be WordPress-related. I figured this was a “perfect” time to upgrade from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0. Again I was wrong. The upgrade wouldn’t work even though I completely changed all WordPress files to the newest ones.
I then tried to alter Apache and PHP setup, only to render the whole website broken.

Long story short: After reinstalling and purging everything related to Apache, PHP, MySQL and the likes I was able to get back online. The cool thing is that the WordPress update was to quick and easy. I didn’t have to reuse anything from the old install besides the database and it was up working again after one click with the mouse using the upgrade script. Very impressive. Pages, links and posts are all preserved as I left it almost two weeks ago.

All that is missing now is the gallery. I need to find a way to make it work again without install from scratch. Propably just some file-permission issues after restoring from my backup.

Well, I’m just happy to be back online.