My Website is BACK!!!

Whoo Hooo! My website is BACK! Didn’t know it was down? Well, I won’t blame you too much. It’s been down for about a week.  The hard drive failed.  Luckily I had swapped the hard drive out when my mini died so I wouldn’t have to re-setup my site.  The drive that died was actually the 60 GB drive from the mini.  I popped in the 80 GB drive that was originally in the PowerBook and began installing all of my server tools.

The last time I setup my server I had to compile all of my stuff from source (Apache, PHP, MySQL) in order to get the latest versions. Luckily I kept a copy of the source files and instructions.  Everything went well until I installed PHP, which was missing some mysql dependencies.  After trying to debug it unsuccessfully, I turned desparately to Mac Ports, an app from the Gentoo Linux project that automatically finds dependencies and compiles software from source.  It let me compile and install all of my server applications without issue.  After a bit of configuration, I was all set again!

Mac Ports turned out to be an amazing application.  Not only did it compile from source but it also included commands to get my server up and running, including commands to get apache and mysql to run at startup, which is difficult to do.  So needless to say, I’m very excited.  And I only lost a couple of weeks of data, none of which I had published.  All in all a pretty good save.