Well, I learned an important administration lession today.
DON’T MESS WITH DATABASE GUI WITHOUT CAREFULY READING THE INSTRUCTIONS!
The “guilty” GIU in my sad story is PhpMyAdmin. To say it clear PhpMyAdmin it is an excelent piece of software especialy for servers which you don’t have shell access. I used it a lot in my “early” days, when I used servers administered by others.
But lately I managed to upgrade my administrative position and started to administer the servers by myself. With this upgrade came shell access and I immerged myself in the magic world of comand line.
But unfortunately the world is not so ideal and every now and then I still have to use GUI. And this is the case of the server hosting this blog.
I’ve spent half of the week setting up the blog and already wrote some articles and after computer free weekend I continued with this pleasent work today. Looking around the other databases on the same server I noticed that the MySQL user I created for this blog has all the privileges on all the databases on the server.
Trying to repair this mistake of mine I spent some time messing around the PhpMySQL and finaly gave up and decided for a more radical solution. I decided to simply delete the user and create it again with the right privileges.
So far so good. The small mistake I made was that I checked a box without carefuly reading the warning text beside it and later also ignored the warning text on the next screen which probaly asking me if I know what I’m doing. I realised what I’ve done on the third screen where my eyes popped out seeing the report on the screen: “command DROP DATABASE xxxxxx completed successfuly”.
I’ve created the database again, granted user with the right privileges, the template was of course left untact, but the content is gone. My only hope to rescue some content is the browser cache on my work computer. I was editing the blog before I went home today, so I hope I can rescue some texts.