The Mac Pro Dual Quad Server Crash of 2012

We were out when the crash happened.

There was a brief power outage in our area while we’re away & saw the usual signs:  flashing timer lights in our oven, audio amplifier, coffee maker and the Mac Pro server was off.

The Power Macs had been hosting my website since 2004 as well as a Movable Type blog that I included in my “Kupitero’s Keep“ website (as an ‘offsite page’) in late 2004 (I started with MT version 3.121) .

I started hosting my website in 2004 using a Power Mac G4 (with OS X 10.3.x aka Panther) and upgraded to a Power Mac G5 (running OS X 10.5.x aka Leopard) in late 2006.

After I had saved enough money, in January 2010, I upgraded to a MacPro Dual Quad since the latest incarnation of OS X during those days – yes, until today – only supported Intel processors.  And, that was the server I was using when the power outage happened.

I powered the server back on – no problems with the hardware – but the OS just won’t load. Uh-oh, here comes the hard part.

I worked frantically the rest of the day & managed to load the OS from the Time Machine backup I had.  Great.

Everything seemed back to normal until I tried to make a new blog post in  Movable Type that fateful day in 2012.  There were errors here and there.  The Movable Type installation was busted and the related MySQL database & PHP scripts were all messed up.

I was able to restore the database and the Movable Type installation several weeks later but there was still a minor problem with one plug-in: Image::Magick.

And, that was the day I decided to do the following:

• Buy a UPS (uninterruptible power supply)
• Have a backup for the server – I got a Mac Mini (quad-core Intel Core i7)
• Move my blog from Movable Type to WordPress
• Revamp my website so that it will be more accessible to the latest and greatest browsers found on phones, tablets, and computers.

I accomplished all these until early December of this year with the exception of the 3rd one on the list above: porting my blog from MT to WordPress.

And, that will be my topic for my next post.