When my web hosting account was hacked about three years ago, I had quite a time getting it cleaned up. There was no “support” for that sort of thing although I likely could have paid someone to figure out what was going on. To make a long story short, I was changing passwords and purging corrupted files in my WordPress installation but everything just kept coming back. Eventually I realized an unknown FTP account had been created and that’s how they were deploying and redeploying everything. I was busy boarding up the doors and neglected to notice a window was wide open (so to speak).

I eventually went scorched earth, backing up and deleting all of my WordPress sites and replacing them with simple HTML “sitebuilder” sites. With the FTP account deleted, the attacks stopped and I just operated like that for the next three years. The other thing I did was to move my personal blog to a server here at home. The content isn’t for public consumption so why not? I installed and configured a Raspberry Pi I had laying around as a LAMP server and put my blog there. That was great until this morning when I discovered I could no longer reach it. We had a power failure here on the weekend and no doubt that has fucked something up.

Apache and PHP seem to be fine. MariaDB is running but try as I might, I could not get an sqldump to work, so I fear my DB is lost. I thought about re-uploading fresh WordPress files to see if something on that side was corrupted but I didn’t. I may yet try that but at this point, I am making plans to set up a new LAMP server on more robust hardware.

I briefly considered using one of my existing or parked domains but no, this content doesn’t need to be online and doesn’t really belong under any one of those “banners”.

I backed up the quake2 folder on the linux game server here and I decided I’m going to use that – fresh install of Ubuntu, LAMP, WordPress and (hopefully) phpMyAdmin so I can do DB backups.

It’s not good that this happened in that I’ve likely lost three years of blog posts but it wasn’t a very smart solution to think a computer the size of two packs of playing cards stuffed up in our armoire was going to live forever.