Conquering Challenges

I really like the topic of the TSQLTuesday party today. Today we have been instructed in no uncertain terms to share a technical challenge with the world with which we were confronted. Ideally we will have conquered that challenge. Sometimes, we may not have conquered the technical challenge. We seldom like to share those stories though. That said, whether or not we conquer the technical challenge, there is another equally important part of the challenge – the journey.

Before getting too far astray with stories and challenges, it is important to note that the host of the party this month is Arun Sirpal (blog | twitter). Arun has posted the invite for the party here. Go ahead and check it out in all of its original glory!

Now back to the challenge at hand – conquering that technical problem and getting that high associated with the metaphorical high of summiting a tough task.

Summits

My technical challenge is not so much of a SQL Server challenge, and is minutely related to a database issue. Let’s start with the broad brushstrokes.

My blog was being hosted on an aging platform. The platform was old enough that it was several versions behind on php. Certain plugins were at a point that I could no longer use the full functionality. In addition, I just needed to ensure that it was updated. Because of this, I was informed that I had to migrate to a different platform provided by the same hosting provider. This is where the fun began.

The migration to the new platform was a simple button click. Unfortunately, despite the promise of a complete site migration – it was not. 99% of everything migrated. Little things like security and my domain name did not migrate. Ok – easy enough, I can update the site to use the domain name for my blog but I had to release it from the old platform first. Upon releasing the domain name from the old platform the “pageok” page error showed for a while until the change was fully propagated. This was a bit of a nuisance and somewhat bothersome for visitors. Believe me – it was a nuisance for me too!

After getting the site to start rendering pages properly, I soon found that there was no longer the appropriate security in place for various things. As I started to go through and try to fix the security, I found I no longer had the ability to manage any of the permissions on my site. In addition, the hosting company could not make the appropriate permissions changes either. What was the recommendation at this point? Another migration to another platform. Commence steam shooting from ears at this point. As I saw it, I had two choices go back to the old dying platform or go to this third platform. I opted for the new trendy flashy shiny platform.

Ruh Roh

At this point, I think it is a good idea to mention that all of this happened just as the new year turned. In addition, I was trying to get last minute edits made for a blog series I had running. This was all on January 2-3, 2018. What a way to kick off the New Year from a blogging point of view. Yeehaw!

I was assured I would have greater control over the new platform. In addition, I was assured it would not take very long. The process was straightforward as long as I had my backups. Believe me, I had my backups. They were even on two sites at this point.

What I did not know was that the hosting company had decided to come in behind me on my original site and decided to make changes. These were changes that complicated the whole process substantially. I only discovered they had made changes after I tried to go back to the original site and access my backups. Guess what? I could no longer access it due to the changes the hosting company had made. Steam is getting hotter now.

In the meantime, I had already started the transition of my domain name to the new platform. Given the new circumstances, this was a mistake. I should have waited to do this until the very end to ensure the site was at least accessible in the meantime.

Once the domain migration finally completed and all of my site files were transferred, users were at least greeted with something new.

Ok, this is in part due to a missing database. That took a while to finally get access back to the original site so I could grab my current backup (which was taken right before the migration). Once finally restored, I started getting this next one.

Lucky for me, this only took a bunch of google-fu to find exactly what I could do to fix it. It seems there was an issue in a config file and I was able to correct the database connection string. Yay – small victory, right? Well, sort of. The blog was fine as long as no links were clicked. You see, there was another change made that caused all of my permalinks to update to one of my alternate domains (again done by the hosting company). Any time I clicked a link I was stumped by why the link was trying to forward to the alternate domain. So because of this link issue, I was back to getting the constant 404 error from a few paragraphs back. (Pretty much straight flames shooting from the ears now.)

Again, more google-fu and I was able to find another fix. This one was part database related and part admin console. Having made the updates in all the requisite places, I was able to now click on most links and the site was at 90% functionality.

This was a full day of working on trying to fix this problem. At this point with the site up, I was able to confirm that I could enact the security policies I wanted/needed. I was also able to confirm most links were working. I did not that some plugins were working intermittently. That was an issue to save for the next day.

On the following day, I went back to work trying to fix various plugin issues that I or visitors had reported. In the end, I had to make some changes to tools I was using because they would no longer work. In addition, there was one specific plugin that was many other plugins to fail (depending on page load order). Once I removed that plugin, it was safe to say that the site was back up and running as expected.

The Wrap

I did not enjoy this journey much at all. Much of the experience was due to outside forces. I can’t do much to control them, but I can do something to fix the net effect of what they caused. While the journey was rather unpleasant, I did finally achieve that Nirvana moment that comes from having conquered the problem.

I didn’t go into extreme technical details because there were many fixes along the path and my focus was on getting it working though I should have been documenting it all along the way. Despite the heat, steam and fire of the experience, I did rather enjoy being able to use some new mysql skills to alter data and fix various problems in the site.