I had a HELLUVA time trying to get this space back up and running over the past four days. There might be some interest so I’ll describe some of the issues I ran into. My geek ego is damaged. Read on to discover why.
This site is hosted in the Chicago and was previously used for VPN into the States so we could watch US Netflix. When Netflix managed to fix the hole I had been exploiting for that, I just set up this web blog and use it for the occasional update and picture dump, especially when I’m wandering around Vegas.
A few weeks ago, I decided to heed a notification I got about my WordPress install that suggested my installed version of PHP was out of date and it would be in my best interest to upgrade. So being the smart ass that I am, I did some quick reading on how to upgrade to the PHP 7.xx version… and immediately borked the whole install. The server would still function but adding entries or making changes to the structure of my web blog was just not possible. Screw it…. wiped the server and started fresh.
There are certain steps that need to happen in a particular order when you’re reinstalling an Operating System (OS) and it’s supporting server software. Each of those steps, if not done in the right order, doesn’t allow for the correct configuration of each server to allow access to each of it’s various components.
For example, if you don’t install PHP near the end of the install stack, it won’t configure correctly to work with Apache with MOD-REWRITE, which is a very important part of a WordPress install.
Needless to say, I probably put in almost 15 hours in trying to get the machine back up and running before I had everything configured properly. I haven’t even touched on that so far in this post but I’ll probably write up something else.
This damaged my geek ego! I wasn’t able to figure out the solution to the problems I kept running into and I felt very sheepish about it. However, my stubborn streak kicked in and I overcame.
There are several other aspects to running an internet facing webserver, namely things to do with security, but I’ll touch on those in a different post. Just know that I’m feeling terribly sheepish but I’ll get over it.