[ivanmcp]

It is Sunday evening, my neck and shoulders hurt, but I am not surprised. I did start at 10 am this morning, but only after finishing at 3 am last night, and 2 am the night before, and the night before the night before... What should have been a routine upgrade has escalated to a complete site and forum migration, and did I learn anything about PHP, MySQL, databases, tables and so on? Who knows. I just know that my head feels as large as hot air balloon.

At least it seems to be over now. Forum feels more responsive, faster and I haven't yet encountered a dreaded 'MySQL has gone away, an email has been sent to a webmaster' message that used to appear all too often. Not to mention the resulting flood of error emails to my in-box.

It all started with a decision to upgrade forum software to a new version which is more reliable and secure. Upgrade went smoothly, initially, but after several minutes, errors started creeping in until the whole forum ground to a complete halt and refused to cooperate. As our web host did not provide Telnet access to our server, database back-ups could not be made, and you guessed it, NO BACKUP = NO RESTORE.

DISASTER!!!

All I had was a backup of old forum files, which I uploaded, erasing the old (new) ones. Hey, there is god after all. Forum suddenly sprang to life, exhibiting itself in a happy light. Mamma, I was so happy that I did not loose any posts that are hiding in this baby and make a good read. So, in conclusion, I nearly paid for not having a backup. This was a good warning, I thought. I will never make a same mistake ever again. Ever! Ever?

This was until I tried to log in as an administrator, just to discover that my password was not valid one. How could this be I asked myself. Couple of more tries, but to no avail. Suddenly I realized my predicament . Upgrade that I run earlier on has encrypted my password to be used with the upgraded forum files. But that was not all. If my password did not work than no other member password would work either. This was soon to be proved to me, as I received fist lot of emails from members unable to log in.

What do I do now? Well I try to run upgrade again, simple, aint it. Wrong. Upgrade was at the dead end as it would detect an earlier attempt at this and would think that upgrade was complete. So out of the window with that brilliant idea. Nothing that I could do now would restore the forum. It was all lost at this stage, and as this forum is not the largest one out there, I was toying with the idea to start afresh; guided with all the wisdom I collected along the way. I sent an email to all the registered users directing them to re-register, which would create an unencrypted passwords thus granting them access. New server space was purchased, database configured and latest forum software installed. Hey, but this was to easy, and why have it easy when you can struggle, despair, pull your hair out and such. At this stage someone suggested I use PhpMyAdmin. Say what? Well, armed with curiosity, I learned the ways of this powerful little tool, and was convinced that it could be very useful, and indeed, it was. I managed to move the database, piece by piece, to the new server and make a backup of it, table by table, but it still refused to work. At least I had data secure and trial and error was the name of a game from there on.
I would reinstall the forum again, let it recreate an empty database, and using PhpMyAdmin, would populate certain tables with previously backed-up data like post, thread, user and so on. This was very time consuming, but at least I had a feeling that with every unsuccessful try I was still moving forward.

Than a breakthrough. By pure chance I discovered that my original admin password that was initially encrypted and could not be used, was now working, as it ran together with latest forum software that supported encryption. This, in return, meant that all the users that were left in cold, were now able to use their original usernames and passwords again. Great. Backup was promptly made via Telnet and it will be made on a regular basis.

I feel that there are many positives out of this mishap. I am more clued up on how this mother works. I had a peek inside! I also learned a very important lesson that I heard time and time again: backup, backup and backup. All in all, forum is now a better place to be, I think.

I can smell a freshly roasted chicken from a kitchen and no doubt I will be summoned up by my wife for dinner any moment now. If I could only cop a massage...

p.s. special thanks go to Tubedogg of vBulletin, who responded promptly to my cry for help, and kept his interest throughout.