The site seems to be running nicely on the old server in the cellar. I’m sure browsing photos isn’t a terribly fast experience any more, but until I can find a reasonably priced hosting provider I can trust, this is the way it has to be. As detailed here, my last dedicated hosting provider turned out to be less than dedicated and not much of a host to his paying guest.

As I’ve mentioned before, the new hardware that Web Host Plus put me on after managed.com sold my hard drive to them was less than reliable. I suspected a few causes, one of which was bad RAM. This theory now seems to have been borne out by an experiment I did. Before I rsynced our photo gallery across the Atlantic, I rebooted the problem box in New Jersey and reduced its operational RAM from 2 Gb to 512 Mb. In that new configuration, I was able to spend many a joyous hour copying my precious data over the transatlantic pipe without the originating box going AWOL. QED, I’d say.

I’ll be cancelling service with managed.com, Web Host Plus or whoever’s running the show now as soon as my next invoicing cycle starts. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as they say.

In the meantime, any DNS oddness you may have been seeing should now be a thing of the past. All slaves are in sync and handing out correct data. Incorrect data in the caches of other DNS servers should now also have expired. Normal service has now been resumed.

Our photo gallery is back on-line.

I was able to bring it back much more quickly than I had first anticipated, because I used an old Gallery 1.x back-up to seed the albums in the Gallery 2.x installation. That copied hundreds of extra, unnecessary files, but they were easily removed afterwards by rsync.

I did this by getting a list of all the album directories on the remote server:

cd /var/www/g2data/albums
find -type d > /tmp/file_list

I then copied this over to the new server with the Gallery 1.x back-up:

for i in `cat /tmp/file_list`; do
  album=${i##*/}
  src=`find /var/www/html/albums -type d -name $album`
  [ -n "$src" ] && rsync -av $src/ /var/www/g2data/albums/$i
done

In the end, I needed to copy from New Jersey only the photos we had taken since mid-February, which is when I had done a full back-up in preparation for migrating from Gallery 1.x to 2.x.

Somehow, one of the tables in the MySQL database had got corrupted in the move:

060518 18:02:38 [ERROR] Got error 134 when reading table './gallery2/g2_ImageBlockCacheMap'

This was easily corrected:

mysql> repair table g2_ImageBlockCacheMap;
+-----------------------------+-------+---------+----------------------------------------+
| Table                           | Op     | Msg_type | Msg_text                                    |
+-----------------------------+-------+---------+----------------------------------------+
| gallery2.g2_ImageBlockCacheMap | repair | warning  | Number of rows changed from 45465 to 45460 |
| gallery2.g2_ImageBlockCacheMap | repair | status   | OK                                           |
+-----------------------------+-------+---------+----------------------------------------+

And, with that, the rescue and salvage operation to yank caliban.org from the incompetent clutches of the unholy alliance of Managed.com and Web Host Plus is 95% or more complete.

Once the residual DNS propagation issues evaporate, I’ll be able to fully exhale once again.

Much of the last 24 hours has been spent seizing those rare moments during which my server — migrated through no desire of mine to Web Host Plus — is up and on the network, and using them to perform a migration of my own, namely to the server in my cellar.

I’m knackered, but a lot has been accomplished today. DNS and e-mail have now been fully migrated, including Web mail and mailing lists. The Web site, too — which you’re now reading — is also up and running on the new (well, actually quite old) server.

The main thing that’s not yet back up is our gallery of photos. That’s because it’s 19 Gb of data, which would be slow to copy from a reliable server on a fast network. Well, I have to copy it from a machine that keeps crashing and is not on a fast network. It could be a couple of weeks before I manage to get all of my data off it… if I’m lucky. I don’t want to even contemplate the notion of not being able to recover all of my data.

I thought I’d left this kind of sysadmin drudgery behind me when I stopped working. Indeed, I moved my domain to dedicated hosting to reduce the downtime and maintenance that I had repeatedly endured when I hosted it myself on a domestic DSL line. Little did I know that I would get to enjoy such advantages for barely a year before falling victim to the worst kind of professional incompetence: that with no sense of responsibility for one’s customers.

And so caliban.org is back on a domestic DSL line, albeit one that has proved itself more reliable than those I had in the US. The upstream bandwidth is also somewhat better.

Anyway, don’t bother looking for new photos — or old ones — in the near future. I’ll announce when — if? — they’re once again available.