I have been in a literal state of PANIC the last few days!

Since the widespread adoption of the internet in the '90s, much of our society has developed a very co-dependent relationship with technology. And that relationship only seems to grow stronger as time marches on. It's not just Snapchat and TikTok-obsessed teens that are driving the demand, either. Businesses large and small, schools and libraries, financial institutions, and even our government officials now leverage digital tools to complete and keep track of sales transactions, provide informative and educational material to the public or to their students, and communicate with or keep tabs on allies and enemies alike. And hey, don't tell me you aren't looking forward to streaming the latest episode of Yellowjackets every damn week. (I know that I am!!!)

Staying connected is a necessity now for people all over the world. Yours truly is no different. And I had two major scares the past few days! Fortunately, they are both lessons learned and can perhaps serve as cautionary tales.

Server Trouble⚙️

As I've mentioned before, one of my latest pet projects has been building and tinkering with my own little web server. This publication and Ghost, the software that powers it, are hosted on said server. I've also used the server to host my website and started trying to throw up some other fun projects here and there. One of the projects that I was going to spin up was an instance of Nextcloud, a service that functions similar to Google Drive, only it's completely private, under your oversight, and out of the hands of a mega-corporation.

The problem is that Nextcloud seems only willing to operate with an Apache server, while my server has solely been using Nginx. There do appear to be ways to make both of those things play nicely with one another on the same server, but it involves a good bit of technical know-how to change which ports the two are listening to on said server and, to be honest, I don't know that I was doing it right. Plus, I was having difficulty getting Apache to start up at all while Nginx was running simultaneously. So, after several days of trying to tinker with things to get them just right, I finally threw up my hands and hastily decided to just completely uninstall Apache, Nextcloud, and all of their modules. All of it. Every single bit. Gone. Scrubbed. Done. It can be a project for a future version of me to figure out.

Later on that evening, I went to click on my bookmark to access the backend of this very blog only to find that it was serving up an error message. “Um, what??” were the immediate words out of my mouth. I didn't recall having uninstalled or otherwise messed with any settings or files associated with Ghost. The entire clean-up spree of that mess was isolated to only Apache and Nextcloud. So I consulted my trusty sidekick, the internet, and eventually discovered that in the process of removing Nextcloud and all of its modules from the server, I also uninstalled the MySQL database that stores all of the content on Jiggy's Journal. That meant that every single post, page, photo, link, settings, design options, and even my list of subscribers were all gone. And not just gone! Unrecoverable.

They were gone gone.

Thankfully, reinstalling MySQL and enabling Ghost to start working again behind the scenes was an easy process. I also had my subscriber list and the first two posts from the blog backed up from when we moved away from Substack. Most of the settings and design options were also easy enough to get back in the right place. Perhaps my biggest saving grace was that I was able to reconstruct the posts that weren't properly backed up from the versions that were emailed out to our subscribers. I wasn't able to save most of the images or reference links that were originally included, but my written text was still available, and I was able to post them back up right away.

I'm very fortunate that everything wound up being saved after all. But the idea of this publication, which I'm still just starting to get underway, being wiped away without my consent was highly alarming. You may notice some small changes in the blog's main page and some other areas, but everything should be back in place now. It should also be common knowledge and practice at this point, but the lesson to learn here is this:

⚠️ Do NOT update, install, or uninstall files or software unless you have backed things up first!

This will be something that I do regularly going forward, regardless of how fed up I might be with the server being cantankerous.

Palia Pains🌿

I've been playing the life-sim video game Palia since early December. I've had the game for quite a while, especially since it's the right price (FREE!), but I didn't start playing it regularly until December. I was on the lookout for a “cozy” game that I already owned that had some winter or holiday-themed celebrations going on to fit in with what I was going for on my Twitch streams at the time. Palia wound up fitting the bill since they had their “Winterlights” events happening. So, in the process of getting festive, I also wound up getting... Well, a little bit addicted to the game, too.

I've been playing fairly regularly for the past several months. I managed to get my sister, followed by the rest of our immediate family, interested in playing as well. It turns out that when something is this entertaining and the cost of entry is nothing, it's actually pretty easy to convince people to give it a try! Who knew?

Palia has been plagued by many issues lately, however. While the game is widely available for free and very fun and playable, it is still technically in a “beta testing” phase, so finding bugs and other things that are broken is pretty common. Especially since its last update on March 25th, where a large portion of the playerbase is reporting that the game completely crashes when transitioning between areas. I've personally experienced the game crashing a number of times myself, but I've typically been able to send a report to the developers and then either re-open the game or just move on.

Things were different today. Something you should know in advance is that my PC has extremely limited storage space left on its hard drive, so a majority of my games and files related to them are stored on a portable hard drive with 4 TB of storage. At some point earlier this evening, while I was in the middle of trying to obtain some in-game resources that I needed for my home plot on Palia, the game locked up on me, indicating that it was about to crash. This time, the game never closed and just sat there doing nothing. I was also having difficulty getting other things to work, so I opted to do a hard restart of the entire computer.

And then... Nothing.

The case of my PC lit up like it was starting and the internal fans started running, but my monitors were completely blank. Just a black screen of nothingness. I tried two more hard reboots to see if maybe it hadn't finished processing something, but nothing was happening. It seemed like my PC was just dead in the water. And that's when panic set in.

I don't have a super high-end computer, but it was a fairly pricey one when I purchased it in 2019. A comparable machine today would be even more expensive. And without my computer, I'm cut off from a wide variety of things that are currently sustaining me. I would no longer be able to effectively stream to Twitch or YouTube, I wouldn't be able to access and write to this blog/email newsletter or any of the rest of my server or web projects, I wouldn't be able to continue my developer education at freeCodeCamp, I wouldn't be able to game with friends or family online anymore, and my ability to continue the ever-frustrating search for a job or source of revenue would be extremely limited. Sure, I still have a laptop and my smartphone with which I could use to access information and perhaps “stay in touch,” but neither of those devices has the necessary power or capacity to do these things efficiently.

However, my nephew saved the day when he was able to get my PC back up and running. I often jokingly refer to him as our “Chief Engineer.” This is because he's a genius at networking and getting our devices to power on. I love and am learning about software and web development, but hardware issues are kind of my blind spot. Plus, he's also a fellow Trekkie, so bestowing him a starship-related title feels appropriate. He recalled that computers can sometimes have issues if they're trying to process too much information at startup, so he started unplugging various USB devices from the machine. That turned out to be the trick! My PC started up immediately. I thought it would be smooth sailing from here on out!

Nope!

Things weren't fixed yet. Upon going to sign back into Palia to try and finally get my game objectives completed, I was surprised to find that Steam didn't seem to think that I even had the game installed. In fact, numerous titles from my collection were missing. All titles that were installed on my external 4 TB hard drive! Eventually, I discovered that the drive wasn't being recognized by Windows at all anymore and, upon unplugging it from my system entirely, it had no more issues restarting properly. After a few more hours of troubleshooting and running Western Digital's diagnostic tools, I believe the crux of this issue is that my PC was in the middle of a read/write process with Palia on my external drive when it seized up on me. It was likely my hasty decision to do a hard reboot that broke things and left the drive in an error state. I also recall having Windows Update download new drivers for Western Digital devices a couple of nights ago as well, but I'm not sure if it played a hand in my dilemma at all.

After the diagnostics determined that the drive was still okay and healthy, Windows started recognizing it again and everything was good in the long run. Also, I could have lived without the drive if necessary. It would have sucked, because it was FOUR TERABYTES of storage that contained a lot of game data, but I could do some organizational gymnastics and reinstall whichever game titles were necessary. No big deal. Thankfully, now it seems that I won't need to. So the next lesson we can all learn here from my stupidity is:

⚠️ Do NOT reboot your system or disconnect drives or devices from it while it is still processing!

This is also now something that I will keep in mind moving forward. I hope that all of you have learned something new as well! 🫠