Moving home...

zman — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 05:30:00 GMT

Not the Zman - this blog. In fact if you are reading this entry then you have moved with me.

Its been almost a year since I went through 3 kinds of hell trying to get this blog moved from the godaddy hosted Community Server service onto a virtual server. Eventually i gave up because i had better things to do with my time. Since then Telligent has release Community Server 2007 and my blog was stuck 2 versions behind. During the time I had my virtual server I explained my problems to several GoDaddy support people including some senior managers but as summer 2007 rolls around I see that nothing has changed. They still only host CS1.1 in their hosted package, they still don't allow you to get a backup of the database and even if they did they still don't give you dbo permission to restore the database into a new instance.

So when i got the expiry notice for my hosting last week I decided enough was enough and I started to make the move over to CS2007. Orcsweb very nicely give all MVPs some web space and Telligent make CS Professional available to us as well. Its not like I need convincing to move with CS - I really like the product and the way its going. But as I suspected moving from 1.1 to 2007 without having access to the database was going to be trouble.

Firstly I exported all the tables in XML format to my local machine - godaddy will be deleting the site soon. These files won't import into CS07 so I needed to create an empty CS 1.1, import the files, check it worked, then upgrade through CS2.0 and then CS07. Problem is you can't find the CS1.1 installer any more and the people on the forums were not much help. They saw the word godaddy and sent me to a very well written FAQ that doesn't answer the question. To be honest I was not very confident that this approach would work anyway - seemed like there were too many places to go wrong and you know its not supported.

So I tried a different approach - converting to BlogML. CS 1.1 doesn't have a BlogML exporter but I found a handy dandy tool that converts an RSS feed to BLogML. I tweaked community server so ensure my RSS feed had all 100+ posts and ran the app.... and got an error about malformed XML. I took a copy of the RSS feed locally and patched up the XML until it passed the RSS validation. But still it wouldn't load into the tool. Since the source is available I figured I could make it work and spent several hours deep in the source code but it became obvious that this was becoming a several day job.

By this time I've wasted the best part of a day on this and realised that this was why I gave up last time. A bit of math made me realise that cutting and pasting and adjusting the dates of my 100+ posts was only going to take 3-4 hours and that was far less that I had already spent.

Sadly it means I lose all the comments and the permalinks change - something that upsets me greatly - but I am of the opinion that I don't have a lot of inbound links and its not worth a week of my time to do it properly. So please accept my apologies and carry on reading.

Now that I have a proper hosted CS07 installation its going to be a lot easier to keep this thing up to date.

You will find some of the inter post links are wrong at the moment. If you find one let me know and I will fix it up. I will get the links and the tags fixed up over the next few weeks.

He's back, and he's mad....

zman — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 04:48:00 GMT

I'm sure you have all been awaiting a new post after I closed things down for a server move. Well 3 months later and I'm back, comments open but on the same old server I was on before.

I am trying to consolidate several shared hosting accounts into a single server and hopefully save some money in the process. GoDaddy have a pretty decent virtual server for around $38 a month which is less than I'm paying in total for my shared hosting. So far so good - set up was easy and all seems to work fine.

Problem 1 - this site is hosted in godaddies shared hosting which means no admin access to the database. So there's no way to back it up. I bitched to their tech support and eventually got an account manager to see sense. Since I was upgrading to a more expensive product they did a backup and put the file on my desktop (remember that!) on the new server.

The summer comes and goes, ZMan is very busy, lots of stuff going on and vacations to take. I tried doing a conversion of the database to Community Server 2.0 and got a ton of errors. So I gave up for a while.

Problem 2 - about a week ago I decide to try again but when I try to log into my server I get an error about the disk being full. Not sure why but I delete a couple of large files and all seems well. Well at least till next time I log in - my windows profile is damaged and Terminal Server just boots me right out. Since this is a virtual server godaddy support only handle the infrastructure stuff and so my only option is a profile rebuild which has the side effect of deleting any files on the desktop. Problem is I never copied the SQL backup file from the desktop and I can't pursuade tech support to step outside the rules for me this time.

So I gave up.. tonight I just gave the order to rebuild the whole server and I will have to worry about a different way to transfer all these blog entries. CS 1.1 doesn't have a good blogML exporter I have heard, or at least one that is compatible with CS 2.0. For now IndieGameGuy will stay here and you can all comment to your hearts conent

While I'm bitching, why does CS1.1 think I'm in an unsupported browser - yes its IE7 but just pretend its IE6 will you and give me my WSISYG editor back....

Zman's Diary : blog hosting

Moving home...

He's back, and he's mad....