it's a long story

i spent some time really, seriously messing stuff up, trying to guess what to edit in a way that would give me just one valid login, just one. but no.

and i begin to suspect foul play, though it very well could have been just me mucking about, however: (1) the last commenter was an extrordinarily nasty rude vicious person, (2) i noticed some really sick ugly search phrases in my mt log files, and (3) in the short time i've been on the new server, already two separate IPs have probed the cgi-bin folder looking for some formmail to hijack. whether or not any these evil people actually caused the blog problems is moot, really. point is, their slime trails were all over my kid's blog, and i am creeped out freaked out and enraged, but mostly enraged, and i am hoping fervently that tomorrow morning, or sometime soon after, those twisted fucks wake up covered in boils and crawling with various vermin, and that being the least of their worries, what with the projectile shitting and the gangrenous genitals. serious. look, i've been really sick, as in i haven't had a cigarette for some six days, and i am in no mood. none.

i'm almost sure the malicious stuff isn't what broke the blog, well mostly, except well ... i did a stupid. (always delete mt-load. always). i think ben and mena did patch the mt-load so it couldn't be used to totally toast someone's blog , but ... anyway, mt-load was still on there, and malicious fuckers do abound, and what i'm saying is, the blog was gone. couldn't access its own database. could see it, couldn't use it. sure, sure, a berkeley version conflict, but then why do three other identical versions of MT from the same place, work?

ok enough of that. so there i was, confronting the fact that i'd lost kurtwood's blog. the pages were there, but no MT to make them a living working blog.

i remembered that the db-to-mysql utility runs without having to be logged in. so i created a database and ran the conversion script. it populated the tables and stopped. stopped. no entries, no comments, no categories, just empty. probably my screwing with the db hosed all the indexes; the data was there, but it had no structure...

so i installed another database on the old servers hoping to salvage something. i ran the utility and it picked up everything - except for authors. no authors. i added an author, directly in the mysql, and tried to login to add more, which got kinda wonky - there had been four author ids, three active, each with corresponding permissions table entries, and mt choked. so, guessing, i made two more authors direct in the mysql, 'cause i did not want to see what a copy of mt does trying to rebuild with posts referencing authors that don't exist. i'm sorry, this really is boring, isn't it?

well, i did a pretty good job guessing - i got the id#s right, i made matching entries in the permissions table, i crossed my fingers, i rebuilt the site, and ... it's all there. every bit. just like nothing ever went wrong.

there isn't really a moral to this story, but if there were it would be something tangential about log files being disturbing and enlightening but mainly disturbing, and ... oh, wow. it's late.