It has been a day of web server angst. Everything related to fringewood.com went down: site, ftp, email, account pages, everything except the DNS. A chat with the provider brought everything back. Well, except a couple of things that were already a problem.
Several weeks ago, I noticed a comment on one of the photos in the Bottomland gallery needed a one letter edit to be proper. I went to log in as admin and it wouldn’t allow me in, said my password was invalid. So, to verify that, I went to the cPanel for database access and clicked on phpMyAdmin. It would’t let me in. This was an issue of the recent migration of servers when Lunarpages sold out to HostPappa. I went back online and chatted with tech support a second time and got that fixed.
I finally get into the database and determined which user name was admin, so I tried that and it failed. So there was some sort of database failure, which I couldn’t check because the password was encoded. I couldn’t retrieve the password via email, because the admin email no longer exists, having been on bottomlandblooms.com. In the process of attempting the rescue, I ended up being banned. Unable to log in, I can’t remove the ban without causing further damage (ftp, database, etc).
I have come to the decision to just pull the gallery. Looking at metrics for the gallery, I have to go back to July of 2017 to find when the gallery drew 500k of bandwidth in a month, and the majority of monthly bandwidths were under 100k. Much of that was mine. So I’ve taken it out of the loop (site navigation), and I’m downloading a copy. (Biggest chunk is the error log, in excess of 1.6G.) As soon as that finishes, the gallery will be uninstalled. Then the folder will be deleted. That will be followed by the removal of the databases and db users.
It’s a gray, cool day, high around 62°F. Appropriate for the demise of the gallery. Farewell to the flowers. (I still have copies of everything I shot at Bottomland on the hard drives.) I might add a section to the other gallery for a select few.
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Never mind, I fixed it. I even updated the email address so that this doesn’t happen again. Thank goodness I had backed up the gallery in the cPanel. After the restoration, I was able to upgrade to current version, then hack the restored database. Once inside the admin section, I was able to alter email and other items. I even made the one letter edit.