MT Success!

After a week of Movable Type installation and upgradation woes, I hath finally vanquished mine enemy and emerged victorious. My tale is long and breathtakingly boring, so I shall not curse thou with the banal details of my struggle without warning. But for posterity, and because some people may have the same problem as me, I shall recount my tale of woe and weary, as well as how my foul enemy was finally defeated.

So las week I embarked on a quest to upgrade Movable Type to the new version. I also figured it would be a good idea to upgrade my database from the once preferred Berkeley db to MySQL. SixApart, the developers of MT, were thoughtful enough to provide a utility (mt-db2sql.cgi) that loads the data from Berkely db to MySQL, say thankya. However, after backing up all my data and following all necessary steps, I ran the script and was baffled by the response. “MySQL server has gone away,” it said. Repeated attempts were to no avail. A helpful poster at the MT Support Forums found the error in the MySQL documentation. Said documentation seemed to indicate that this was a server timeout problem. I opened a support ticket with my host and they confirmed that “We do have some limits in place that restrict the amount of time queries can run for, or how much memory they

may consume.”

At this point I almost despaired. This was about 3 days after the initial attempt, and my lack of progress was depressing. But, in my desperation, I set the script up to run again, and asked my host to run it for me, figuring that they would be able to run it as an admin (or otherwise get around the query limits on the server). My host graciously agreed, and ran the script for me. Checking the database with PHPMyAdmin, I could see that all the pertinent data was in the appropriate location. Victory is mine! Or so I thought.

Overjoyed at finally completing the data load, I anxiously logged in to MT. Alas, it was not to be. I logged in, and saw that neither of my blogs was appearing. What foul devilry was this? I could see my profile information and the Activity Log, but I could not view (and thus, I could not edit) either blog. Even more frustrating, the MT System Stats box showed “Total Blogs: 2.” This meant that MT was getting data from MySQL, but that not all of it was showing up.

Again, I almost despaired. Subsequent posts to the MT Support Forum did not produce any results. For three days, I languished in agony, and in moments of weakness, I debated switching back to Berkeley db. But this morn, I decided to give the MT Support Forums one last check, and though no one had responeded to my pleading posts, I did find one post in another forum on another subject, which proved to be most helpful.

In short, that post contained links to a few useful configuration utilities, including the glorious MT-Medic. After downloading, configuring, and installing MT-Medic, I saw that my Username in MT no longer had the correct permissions set. For whatever reason, mt-db2sql.cgi did not transfer over said permissions when it ran, and thus my Username did not have permission to see my blogs. MT-Medic allowed me to fix this problem quickly and easily. (I must also thank the Multiple Blog Suite for help in diagnosing the problem).

With that demon slain, I was able to log in to MT and write this entry. Success was finally mine. I can finally post again, and upgrade MT-Blacklist so as to prevent massive comment spamming (apparently, spammers found a way to submit comments even during the period of limbo). So there you have it. If you’re still reading this and wondering what the hell I’m blathering about, please accept my apologies, but I figured this post could be a help to others who will no doubt suffer from this problem in the future.

Update: Well then, it seems my celebrating was a bit premature. It turns out that none of my templates made the switch, and so when I tried to publish this entry it didn’t show up. So I switched back to Berkeley db, copy/pasted all of the templates into files, which I then imported into the MySQL version of MT, at which point I was able to publish this. Yes, so another helpful hint: Use the link this template to a file feature. Again, apologies to those who have no idea what I’m talking about…

Again Update: It seems that in the conversion process, all of my entries lost their category associations. Odd. So the category archives might be acting funny until I can go back and recategorize everything. Given MT 3.x’s new subcategory feature, this might not be a horrible thing, but still, another thing to be aware of…