Ego Link

Previously I had mentioned that "technical nightmares" had been upon me. Well, the cat is out of the bag. I was doing some after-hours side work getting the Movable Type install on Stanfords Cyberlaw server over to Marc's server. Now what was so bad about it? It was MT after all. Move the data files, it was still running in BerkeleyDB storage mode for various reasons, and it should just work. Right? Welcome to Your Wrong night.

By now you are saying to yourself that I'm an idiot, and you may be right, but not for the reasons you might be thinking of. You're probably thinking that I didn't update the db files as it states in the MT troubleshooting docs. Well, it's not quite as easy as that. Well, actually it is, but as I stated earlier, I'm an idiot. There were at least four different db_update versions installed on the new server.

Anyway, did you know that MT will not give you any errors if it can't read the data files? Doesn't that seem a bit...off? Anyway, the long and short is that it was a db version problem and a file ownership problem. I had tried both, just not together. With no error messages I was flying blind. I didn't know if anything I did made any difference. It was amazingly frustrating not to have any meaningful output from my actions.

Live and learn. Off to file feature request for MT to give an error when it can't read the data files...