More than a month ago, I had a serious problem with the boot drive of the machine that hosts my blog. I managed to get a new system installed, and I copied everything over.

It didn’t take too long to get the webserver running again, but I was having some troubles with my Movable Type installation. I diagnosed the problem as a version inconsistency between the Berkeley DB libraries that were installed on the old system and those installed on the new one.

I monkeyed around for a while trying to get newer versions of the libraries, and recompiling the Perl DB_File module against them, and so on. That all seemed good, and finally I ran the old db files through the db_dump185 | db_load
routine, then copied the new files into the MT db directory, and suddenly I could log in to MT again. Great!

Not so great, though. Upon closer inspection, I saw that db_dump185 was producing an empty dump of my entries database. Yuck.

Then I remembered that in moving the new copies of the db files over, I had a problem until I changed the ownership and permissions so that the MT process running via CGI could read them. Then I realized that I had never done that in the first place. Then I remembered that I had been puzzled for a while because the UNIX file tool had been telling me all along that the files were Berkeley DB 1.85/1.86 files, so why did I need a newer version of the db libs?

So I went back and rebuilt DB_File against Apple’s libSystem (which includes the DB libraries in version 1.86 form), restored my old DB files from backup, and changed the permissions so that the CGI could read them.

Suddenly I could log in to MT, and it seemed to see all my entries, and, if I’m lucky, it’ll let me post this new entry.