I had a bit of an annoying two days. Yesterday, I was pursuing my hobby of building websites, by trying to build out a prototype of a website for a friend. An early step in this process is creating a subdomain on one of my domains (e.g. caveatdumptruck.com is this blog’s domain, and something like “blog.caveatdumptruck.com” would be a subdomain). This should be an easy step, but it’s crucial because you don’t want to mix a new website up with any existing websites on a given domain.
Instead, somehow the versions of some of the software running my web server got “out of sync” – that’s my best guess as to what happened. There’s a lot of software on the “back end” of a website: apache (the “web server”), php (the thing that makes webpages “interactive”), wordpress (the blog publishing tool that can also be used to build not-so-bloggy websites of various sorts), certbot (the free certificate registrar that makes websites “secure” so your browser doesn’t give you alarming notices about bad guys), etc. All of these have to talk to each other. And if they have different versions, they might stop understanding each other.
So something was bad. And my whole server ended up down and all websites on it inaccessible. I spent 8 hours today uninstalling and reinstalling various bits and pieces, trying to get everything in sync again. It was really above my competency. So frustrating, because when I finally got it working, I’m not even sure how I did it.
So a 15 minute task took two days, with 8 hours this morning desperately trying to get my server up and running – this is not the main server, so my blog and map server weren’t down, but my pictures are hosted on this secondary server, as well as several sites I’m running for friends.
