Tim{othy} Cooper » Technology

All’s well that ends well

Tim — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:12:12 +0000

It’s taken a while, but I’m just about back to where I was before this afternoon’s fun. As you might expect, I’ve created a backup of my VPS. I am now back to running Plesk 8, WordPress 2.7, Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6.9.

Don’t you love technology?

Leaving well alone – shoulda

Tim — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 15:27:47 +0000

You know those times when you see ‘update’ and off you go and click only to wish you hadn’t? Well, I had one of those moments earlier today with my VPS and Plesk. Plesk told me there are updates available to version 9, so I thought, why not?

First mistake (and I should know better) – I didn’t do a backup prior to updating
Second mistake (and I should know better) – I didn’t research to see if there are any issues that others have found.

So, having clicked update, off it went and updated from Plesk 8 to Plesk 9. The first issue was that it didn’t recognise the license key and refused to work. I re-booted the VPS and that sorted itself out somehow. I then noticed that the left-hand navigation was missing some of the icons. This set me off looking for answers…

Several hours later, I see it’s a wide-spread issue for those of us using Virtuozzo and VPS. It’s borked!

Fortunately, I had taken a backup of the VPS recently (3 weeks ago), so I decided to restore. First I took a backup of my WordPress database and wp-content directory. I also took screen shots of all of the relevant settings for my domains and email accounts (on the Mac screen print is Mac key+Shift+3 which creates a picture.png file on the desktop – nice).

I then took a backup of the VPS in its current borked state, then restored…

All went well. I have ftp’d my wp-content directory and restored my WordPress database. All is well so far.

Now I just need to go and set up a couple of new domains, email accounts and re-upload all my Joomla and Drupal stuff.

Lesson learned – backup, backup, backup. And I should know better.

Smartphone : which one?

Tim — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 00:27:08 +0000

I’ve been in a dilemma…I want a new phone, but which one?

Stephen Fry posted a review of 3 smartphones over on his blog recently and he was pretty scathing about the new Blackberry Storm, so that rules that one out for me.

I’ve read mixed reports about Google‘s first foray into mobile phones, so that’s out.

That leaves me back with Apple’s iPhone. Despite its well-documented shortcomings, it seems to be the best option out there. No video, cut-and-paste, MMS, and so on, but a growing number of third-party applications.

All food for thought.