Tuesday morning, one of my friends informed me that my web forum was offline. I didn’t think too much about it (servers reboot occasionally) until I noticed another one of my sites was also offline. Both sites were built on an older version of PHP, and a few minutes of troubleshooting revealed that my webhost (HostGator) had unceremoniously (read: “without notification”) removed PHP5, instantly breaking two of my websites. One of the sites, one I used to track my bookmarks, was salvageable. The other, my forum, was completely broken.<\/p>\n

The technical issues were complicated by the fact that my forum was running an outdated version of phpBB. The version I was running was incompatible with PHP7, the only version available for me on my webhost. The only way to fix my forum was to upgrade it to a newer version compatible with PHP7, but according to the documentation I found, the first step involved logging into the old forum… which I could no longer do.<\/p>\n

By midnight, I had already tried — and failed — to perform the upgrade multiple times. The old forum software wouldn’t work with the new version of PHP. The new version of the software wouldn’t see the old database. Every time something started working, something else broke. It was like working a Rubik’s Cube; each time I solved one side, I scrambled another. Shortly before bed, I decided to kick off the upgrade one last time and let it run overnight. I had hoped that when I woke up Wednesday morning, everything would be fixed.<\/p>\n

While laying in bed, I came up with two alternative plans. The first, which I was convinced wouldn’t work, was to create a brand new forum, import the old database, and see if phpBB would recognize what I was trying to do and upgrade the database. The only other solution I could come up with involved building a webserver at home, installing multiple copies of PHP and phpBB, and trying some truly crazy stuff. Trust me, a couple of you reading this almost got calls in the middle of the night. <\/p>\n

I woke up Wednesday morning to find that the upgrade didn’t work. Before leaving for work, I tried my “hail Mary” idea. A few hours later, I got a text message from another friend telling me my forum was back online. My last ditch effort worked… mostly. The forum’s themes were broken, the graphics were gone, and the admin panel was throwing up errors from all the incompatible files left behind… but it worked. When I got home from work I literally ran to my computer and confirmed that 11 years worth of posts had not been lost. <\/p>\n

“Whooped ’em again, Josey.”<\/i><\/p>\n

I’m writing this just after midnight on Wednesday, having spent several hours fixing things. For the most part, the only things still broken are things that were broken before the upgrade. I really didn’t deserve to come out of this catastrophe unscathed, but it appears I did.<\/p>\n

On to the next one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tuesday morning, one of my friends informed me that my web forum was offline. I didn’t think too much about it (servers reboot occasionally) until I noticed another one of my sites was also offline. Both sites were built on an older version of PHP, and a few minutes of troubleshooting revealed that my webhost (HostGator) had unceremoniously (read: “without notification”) removed PHP5, instantly breaking two of my websites. One of the sites, one I used to track my bookmarks, was salvageable. The other, my forum, was completely broken. The technical issues were complicated by the fact that my forum… (read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[170,169,171],"class_list":["post-13027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-php","tag-phpbb","tag-upgrade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13027"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13029,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13027\/revisions\/13029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robohara.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}