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Server upgrades

Major upgrades on the home server this past week.

First, I upgraded MySQL from 3.23.53 to 5.0.67. Way overdue to get this done. My blog and wiki use it, so there were multi-honed dependencies that needed to be addressed at the same time. I installed it side-by-side on a different port and then copied the individual databases over (using SQLyog). That eliminated the recommended upgrade from 3.23 to 4.0 to 4.1 and then from 4.1 to 5.0.x. I don't have any stored procedures or fancy triggers, so that would have probably been unneccessary anyway.

Then, I worked on my MediaWiki installation and getting that from 1.3.7 to 1.13.2 (I hate lack of zero-padding in version numbers). Only issue was remembering where the database settings were. PHP sets the database URL in php.ini under [MySQL] mysql.default_port and mysql.default_host. MediaWiki set it in LocalSettings.php | $wgDBserver = "host:port";. Make sure you set both values and turn off your existing database service to test! Otherwise you'll look as dumb as I did when I couldn't figure out why it was complaining about and old database version. Idiot.

The Movabletype upgrade from 2.661 to 4.21 was more involved. Database URL and user set up in mt-db-pass.cgi and mt.cfg | Database and DBUser. Change the first line in all Perl scripts from "#!/usr/bin/perl -w" to the actual path (I still think that's an idiotic system). If you get the error Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client, run the following:

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('password') WHERE Host = '%' AND User = 'user'; 
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

I had to do this even though the user was created fresh in the new MySQL. Dunno why; just had to. If you have to add any Perl modules via CPAN and get the dreaded Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1., remember that Windows expects double-quotes as delimiters, not single-quotes. Once past all of this, MT happily upgraded the database tables and started anew. The changes in this version are ... mind-boggling, but I guess it's to be expected going from 2.x to 4.x. Many new features to discover.

Expect weirdness for the next few weeks as I iron out things I'd forgotten (like my wiki becoming unauthenticated for the first day, oop). Next maybe I'll try one of those fancy new WEB 2.0 layouts I hear are all the rage.