Converting a Mini to a Server, Part 8: Wrap Up
So far the Mini is chugging along quite happily. Here are a few hopefully final notes.
At various points over the last day the Mini would spontaneously lose its ability to find the router and thus could not connect to external systems. However external systems could connect to it. Possibly this was related to using DHCP with manual addressing. I switched over to static addressing and so far it seems fine.
The WordPress transfer was smoother than I expected but not as smooth as it could or should be. For one thing, the URL of the site should probably not be stored in various places in the main database. That makes it too hard to move to a different URL. Instead it should be stored in the config file along with the database user name and password. Furthermore it should be stored once. Storing it in multiple places and then doing a search and replace in the SQL script to update risks breaking links that shouldn’t be changed. I still have to search for any broken links here and fix them.
I did have one glitch while moving Mokka mit Schlag. I had not correctly given the database user the right permissions to access the wordpress database. The error message WordPress gave me here was misleading. It did tell me that it could connect to the database server and that the username and password were correct. Good! A lot of systems don’t get this far. However it then incorrectly diagnosed the problem. It claimed the wordpress database did not actually exist which was false, and which WordPress should have been able to detect. It should have told me the real problem, that the database user didn’t have permissions on the wordpress database.
Finally, SQL scripts are just a quick hack for database backups. WordPress (and other blogging systems) should be able to export and import a complete dump of the database including at a minimum usernames, comments, posts, and passwords into a single XML file. This would enable not only moving between WordPress on different systems but between different blogging engines. Some blog systems such as Moveable Type are part of the way there. However WordPress so far only imports. It does not export. Posts check in but they don’t check out.
