Recovery account: March, 2015

APK: do you have a "HOWTO" for deploying the new PM? If not you might want to record the steps as you do this, so there is less burden on you in the future.

JAC: We have some old developer docs that provided useful indications, and luckily I've done this several times before, making "dev" versions on the Linode so I'm a bit familiar with the usual glitches.

Here's a quick 5 point summary of my experiences this time around. (And yes, I do think it is a good idea to write a slightly more detailed note about this for future reference - I'll do that shortly.)

(1) After installing the LAMP stack + Drush, and creating a database with the same name and password, it's possible to restore like this:

drush arr PMbkp_2015022300.tar

Content was already showing up after moving the result of that into the path of Apache -- albeit with broken CSS and links.

(2) After clearing the cache (always important with Drupal), I realized that it is necessary to run (i.e. visit in the browser) the update.php script. Getting access to it required a temporary override to one of the variables in settings.php. Otherwise, Drupal was preparing to reinstall everything from scratch and I did not want that.

(3) After running update.php and clearing the cache some more, the CSS was working again. Links were still broken, but that is a familiar experience, and it meant that the .htaccess file wasn't being read. So, I fixed the relevant variable in apache.conf.

(4) That worked, and when I got access to the "admin" interface again, I took the opportunity to delete the latest round of spammers - we really must find a better way to keep them away, otherwise having the site online is risky...

(5) Finally (for now) I then spent some time updating, patching, or disabling Drupal modules to make the pink error message boxes go away.

Notes

(Note 1) Most of the time was probably spent fussing with Apache, which I still don't really understand properly, but I got it working.

(Note 2) I still need to set up peripherals like LaTeXML, NNexus, Apache Solr, Virtuoso and probably some others... and of course a new script to make backups! ... but anyway, Drupal itself is back, and the data looks fine.