Friday morning (probably 7:20am judging by timestamps on files), shortly after I downloaded my emails, I clicked on a blog comment notification to mark it as spam, and a very scary error came up that my cpanel account had been suspended.
I had a heart attack, as you can well imagine.
So I got onto the Vodien online chat in a bit of a panic. I had two problems. Firstly they didn't want to talk to me because the two DNS accounts I have aren't actually linked to my hosting account - that's separate. And secondly they wanted to send any notifications to the email address on file - which is my old CIA email address - which I haven't had access to in about a year and a half. So after a bit of back and forth (and them wanting me to send letters on company letterhead asking for the email to be changed, to which I said I'm not a company, and they said well send a letter with id, and I'm like the domain was registered in my maiden name, and they were like, well add a marriage certificate as well...hmmm...), they finally suggested pointing my A records for the domains to a new IP address. That's when the penny dropped - the account had simply moved to a new host. And I'm like, why didn't anyone tell me, and they were like, well it went to that CIA address. Le sigh.
Anyways, so I changed the name servers from spook and snoop to Vodien, and changed the A record, then got hold of the cpanel url. And I was in! Literally the first thing I did was get into phpMyAdmin and do a backup of my databases - because I hadn't done one in four months (I know, don't judge).
After work I had a bit more of a poke around. Sadly my three cia.com.au domains are now officially dead - as I don't have access to the CIA nameservers to update their records. So that's a bit sad. I've had kazza.cia.com.au since 1997. I'm going to miss conspiracy.cia.com.au, I think that's a pretty cool domain name. They still have the terminal access widget which is a relief. But I'm now forced into putting new subdomains under /public_html, rather than outside that root. Not really a big deal, but I will have to kill off the ciapics.cia.com.au parent anyway, so will just have a placeholder page or something. I wanted to get the gallery apps running again but they're not working, not sure why, need to find logs or something. Not that I was planning to keep those, but I did want to extract some of the photo labels from some old work pics. I'm still trying to get FTP working properly. I swore it worked for my main account last night, but now is having issues, possibly because I've been trying to get David's FTP working again and getting myself greylisted in the process.
But the nicest part about all of this is that https works out of the box! The blog has issues because the links to everything are all hardcoded, and stylesheets won't load due to mixed content. But RSS feeds that used to have issues in Chrome are now working. Oddly, ssl on David's site doesn't work - because it thinks the certificate belongs to www.aacfp.com.au. Weird. Probably much the same problem as I had with the old site. I can't figure out how to make Movable Type insert https links instead of http .. or even better relative links. Will tinker with that some more.
I really do need to find a new host tho... I think if I try to update my email address they will look at the account and wonder why I'm not paying for it. Easy enough when I still knew the owners, but it's been bought out so many times they won't care that I helped them build their company... Although given that SSL now works, and they still have shell access, and they're not on the old CIA/Host1/Webcity servers (the ones that had a big outage back in July), I would definitely consider staying, depending on how expensive it was....
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