Welp, been quite a while since I last posted. To my own site, that I’ve been paying for and maintaining for years… But I digress. (I still have that upgraded PC, it’s in a different case, has a 4070 ti Super, and 64GB RAM). My intention with this site was to keep notes on odd fixes I discovered, sort of my own personal KB or documentation system. Something that would stay with me regardless of where my career took me. This site has long since passed being used for notes, more of a history of my career in IT since 2007, although I started way back in the late 90’s stealing the RAM from my parents computer at night and putting it in mine so Simcity would run better. Or building simple HTML sites using a netlink and my sega saturn.
In the last 4 years I was fired and hired on the same day. Sold our home in Boise, flirted with moving to Tennessee, rented in Kuna, and bought in Middleton. I still work with Azure but now also Oracle and a lot more linux. Although I’m siloed off from the larger implications, AI is taking over. I’m not opposed to it, it can be helpful and I’ve used it in some troubleshooting. As always IT is constantly changing, although I’m a greybeard now.
Which brings me back to this site. I lied, I did post earlier by documenting our new house build for my family. I found it had crashed and it looks like it may have been a hack. I don’t know how else the collation on the mysql database gets changed. And of course I wasn’t regularly backing it up. My cheap scheme of hosting it for $10/mo on Azure with in app mysql came to an end though. Now I have a traditional app service with a container and a mysql server and it’s $26/mo (B1 app service plan $12 and the mysql server is $14). To recover the site I built a new WordPress App using Azure, they offer an app service specifically for wordpress. I used the mysql server to import the database and then figured out how to change the collation. Which required me doing it on all tables and columns. Google gave me some queries that made it a lot faster. Then switching the wordpress config to my fixed database.
After that it was a matter of getting the site files uploaded, regenerating the thumbnails for the images, and fixing plugins. Specifically W3 total cache which I do not recommend installing. I think I’m married to it now because I cannot remove it without tons of site errors, and I don’t feel like figuring it out. Oh, and I have a privacy policy now too.
That’s the short of it. Stayed tuned for another 4 years when I post again!
Maybe I’ll post about fixing old iPods.
