Dreamhost Tech Support

I love these guys… seriously!

I do tech support for a living, so I know how big of a pain in the ass it can be to have to answer stupid questions…(especially ones where the answer is obvious.. at least..in hindsight)

Since I’d read the part in Hacking Movable Type about using the mysqldump command, and scheduling it through your server’s Cron command… I’d been trying (in between playing with MT 3.2 beta, and redoing all the templates – See the new title picture up top? That’s what happens when you delete the wrong files, and have no backup of some stuff!—anyway..back to the real story) to get it to work. I’d gotten the command to work, if I just entered it from my shell account on the server.. worked like a charm (after a few tries to get formatting correct).

The problem? everytime I added it to Cron.. it failed.. badly.. like a 2 year old taking a driving test kinda bad..

So, Like any good geek.. I do some Googling, and some flipping through of Dreamhost’s online support section… not finding anything that looks like it would help, I throw in the towel, and send them an email.

Response was quick.. 24 hours or less.. and then the work began, we spent several days emailing back and forth, and trying different things. Finally, today they fix my problem and email me to let me know about it. The solution that was obvious in hindsight? Turn the stupid command into a script, set the script executable, and have Cron run the script!

Works flawlessly… now.. if I can just remember to backup the rest of the site information….