You see, our local hometown cable company was recently put on the auction block and Comcast was the buyer. Impersonal, monolithic Comcast. Now, aside from Comcast completely boning just about everybody's email this weekend during the transition, and apart from their "EasyChange" transfer system being Windows-only, Comcast also found the time to send threatening emails off to Dreamhost, my super-excellent domain host for almost five years.

This was either an incredible coincidence or it was triggered by me tinkering with my email settings. Because, under the previous cable company (Suscom... no, you haven't heard of it), I was simply forwarding all ___@fourhman.com email on to ___@suscom.net. It made things a little easier to manage, plus I used it to take advantage of Suscom's spam filters. Well, Comcast does not allow that. And despite Dreamhost's repeated attempts to contact them (on behalf of ALL their customers who are forwarding mail from their personal domains to their home Comcast boxes), Comcast has proven to be unreachable. And the threat further proclaimed that Comcast fully intends to block any and all email coming from domains hosted by Dreamhost, forwarded of not. Must be nice to be the monopoly.

So Dreamhost unfortunately and apologetically had to tell all their users to "turn off" any email forwarding that goes in Comcast's direction. Or risk having their entire world end up on Comcast's blacklist.

My plan was to sidestep Comcast entirely and just formally promote all of my fourhman.com email addresses into full-blown email mailboxes, rather than just holding zones for Suscom/Comcast. Using Dreamhost's slick and easy domain Control Panel, I started with joe @ fourhman.com... and then set up Apple's Mail app (jesus guys, can you give that a real name some day?) to fetch my mail from fourhman.com instead of Comcast.

But what I didn't notice was that my "joe" account - the primary account - had a default disk storage allotment of 50MB. Or more accurately, I noticed it but didn't thinkg anything of it. Yes, Dreamhost printed the number in red and asterisked a warning that the number applies to the entire website... but I still figured that was somehow separate from the 50MB email limit. Pro tip: It's not.

Later that night, I decided to throw up another weblog entry - the latest in a long and interminable series of Sam and Max screenshots - and Movable Type completely freaked out. The error said that I had surpassed my disk quota.

"Freaking hell," I probably said, and I went back into the Panel to turn off that 50MB restriction.

Then I went back into Movable Type to find the poor unloved thing tossing SCALAR errors and suggesting my entire weblog database was corrupt.

That's about when I started to cry.

Fourhman.com was still there, but it was dead. Movable Type would not let me post new entries, view/edit older ones, or even click through my main MT weblog menu. The only thing I could do was backdoor my way into the individual weblog edit menus and export a text dump backup. Which was slightly comforting, because my offline backups are a few months old.

Then I did a little research, and found out that this is exactly what happens when you have a Berkeley database that thinks it is supposed to grow beyond the set user disk limits. It corrupts your data. It's one of the reasons that everybody says that Berkeley databases are crappy and that you should use a MySQL database. I do not recall why I went with Berkeley back when I first installed MT back in '02, probably because the MySQL option was more complicated at the time.

So, given that I have all my entries exported, what I'm looking at is a full clean install of Movable Type (the MySQL version.)

The thing is, I hate installing Movable Type, because the whole thing veers just over my head. Their instructions are fine, but if anything burps at me, I have no idea what to do about it. And I just know that it's going to take me hours to muddle through.

So I start searching for alternate methods, but everything I find about resurrecting Berkeley databases is more complicated than the last. Until one webpage suggests a very simple plan: ask your webhost to restore your site from one of their timed backups.

Duh.

Therefore, I sent out a support request to Dreamhost and that's exactly what they did. They essentially rewound fourhman.com to August 20, 2006. And, being extra-awesome, the gang at Dreamhost was smart enough to just replace my MT database instead of the whole kaboodle. Now that's tech support.

Of course, I had to rebuild my weblog entries from the last two weeks, but that's a small pain compared to having to wipe the server clean, re-install Movable Type, and import all the entries, templates and crap.

And that's the confused-verb-tense version of what happened over the last few days. Instigated by Comcast, exacerbated by my naive innocense, and solved by Dreamhost. I guess I should look into upgrading Movable Type into a more modern MySQL version, but even that has my eyes spinning. For as long as I've used their free version, they probably deserve me sending them some money for the new stuff. Hell, I'll probably pay them to install it.

The funny part is, during the tense period before Dreamhost got back to me with the technological go-ahead, I was constantly coming up with great weblog entries. Now that it's back, I'm just as lazy as I've ever been.