I still don’t know how it happened. I somewhat suspect I got hacked, somehow … I found strange and unexpected Chinese IP addresses in my mysql error log. But I don’t understand mysql back end or admin well enough to know for sure what was going on.
I was able to restore a full-server backup to a new server instance, and have re-enabled the mysql-driven websites (my 2 blogs, my wiki, etc.) on the new instance. Meanwhile, I somewhat stupidly reactivated the non-mysql website (the geofictician OSM-style mapping site, the so-called “rails port”) on the old server instance. The consequence of that is that I am now stuck with a two-server configuration where I had a single server configuration before. I think in the long run I’ll want to isolate ALL my mysql-based sites to a single server, and ALL my non-mysql-based sites to another single server. That’s going to take a lot of shuffling things around, which is not trivial.
For now this blog (and my other blog) seems healthy and up-and-running, again.
There may be more downtime ahead as I try to reconfigure things more logically, however.
[This entry cross-posted from my other blog.]
