{"id":3893,"date":"2018-10-04T10:32:52","date_gmt":"2018-10-04T09:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=3893"},"modified":"2019-09-30T12:50:06","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T11:50:06","slug":"brief-update-for-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2018\/10\/04\/brief-update-for-2018\/","title":{"rendered":"Brief update for 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So &#8230; you may notice the site disappeared for some time, and now it&#8217;s back all images are missing. This is down to three things:<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> MariaDB&#8217;s supporters put a nasty little poison-pill into the Debian OS that blocks MySQL DBs from working once triggered, to try and force everyone onto Maria.\n<li> My online backup setup couldn&#8217;t cope with the > 1GB of images + videos I had embedded in this blog over the years, so I was manually doing full backups of images every year or so.\n<li> In an emergency (needed a particular version of OS X to run something for work, at very short notice) I wiped the hard drive with my local backup of images.\n<\/ul>\n<p>MariaDB&#8217;s poison-pill damaged the OS so badly that I had to do a complete wipe + re-install the OS. I couldn&#8217;t unfuck the packages. I had complete backups of all configuration, and recent backups of the DB contents (although I lost about 5 or 10 blog posts, spread across my various blogs, maybe 2 or 3 each). Maria refuses to come online with the fully up-to-date backups I had from MySQL (double yay for how crappy this Maria thing is &#8230; although this is an inherited bug from MySQL itself, it&#8217;s always had major problems with restoring databases by any means other than text dump, which in my haste I forgot), and after a few days of work, I gave up trying to fix it.<\/p>\n<p>The last two items were temporary hiccups (I was in the process of setting up and testing a new multi-gigabyte backup system when I ran the automatic update for Debian). The first item, the root cause of what happened &#8230; my opinions there are quite salty. Yay for politics in OpenSource being more important than preserving users&#8217; data!<\/p>\n<p>(the poison-pill was a virtual package that if you tried to do upgrades to MySQL would insert itself and break your OS&#8217;s packages. The idea appears to have been: &#8220;Many people won&#8217;t realise that MySQL is no longer politically free, and is now owned by Oracle, and that the MySQL original team have abandoned it to make a new rival! So &#8230; let&#8217;s stop people from accidentally continuing to use Oracle-owned software!&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><strong>In principle, I agree with that idea<\/strong>: I hadn&#8217;t noticed the spat in MySQL world, and was only vaguely aware of MariaDB. It was good to be informed that something odd was going on in MySQL. HOWEVER &#8230; their choice of a dangerous and ultimately (in my case, at least) destructive bomb in the OS was extremely bad form, and frankly unforgivable: it violates one of the basic trusts of Debian, built up over decades.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally &#8230; a spat that I <strong>have<\/strong> noticed is the splintering of Debian, with a substantial bunch of the maintainers dumping it and making a &#8220;new&#8221; Debian thing that&#8217;s supposedly true to Debian&#8217;s roots. That upset me, but switching was going to be very expensive (I&#8217;ve investigated it a couple of times). However, the Maria incident strikes me as exactly the kind of &#8220;screw Debian&#8217;s reputation; let&#8217;s abuse our influence!&#8221; attitude that those guys were complaining about. I guess it&#8217;s time to more aggressively dump Debian &#8211; certainly for all new installs!<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t you just hate it when people come along and shit on the shoulders of giants? :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So &#8230; you may notice the site disappeared for some time, and now it&#8217;s back all images are missing. This is down to three things:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3893"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3901,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3893\/revisions\/3901"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}