Wesley's Tool-Box

With major tasks at the workplace wrapped up, I decided that the National Foundation Day holiday would be a good time to upgrade the Mac mini server from El Capitan (OS X 10.11) to Sierra (OS X macOS 10.12). For a warm-up, I upgraded the MySQL Server installation from 5.6 to 5.7 before that, but I ran into some weird issues and took about an hour to resolve. After getting MySQL to work again, I made a full system backup and installed Sierra. With the new OS in place, I restored the server configuration and now you see that the website is back in action. iPhone 7 review will resume shortly.

Apple held a big press event yesterday, introducing new products like iPhone SE and iPad Pro 9.7", while releasing new OS updates - iOS 9.3, watchOS 2.2, tvOS 9.2, and OS X El Capitan 10.11.4. While I have updated iOS and watchOS as soon as possible, including the betas, I had been holding my Mac mini and Macbook Air from getting El Capitan (OS X 10.11) updates, and instead kept using Yosemite (10.10). This was mainly to have the server running stable.

But now I felt that any early kinks in El Capitan had been fixed and it was getting increasingly inconvenient to have the previous version of OS X holding back some new features I could enjoy on my iOS devices. So I decided to take the plunge today. After about an hour of installation and fixing any broken server configurations that the new OS installed had caused, everything is running alright again.

There's been some DB errors on the website today because there had been reboots and MySQL failed to automatically start each time ever since upgrading to OS X 10.10 Yosemite. I knew of this problem, but since the disruption was starting to get annoying I decided to find a way to fix it. Apparently, the fix goes all the way to 2010 for fixing the same issue in OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard by Marko Tomic. Then a simpler version for Yosemite came up a few weeks ago, which is largely similar to a 2013 entry at Apple Support Communities.

This was happening because MySQL has been using a very old way to autostart the service and never bothered to update it, making it susceptible to failure for several years already. Until there's an official fix, the following should be entered into the Terminal.app, which is essentially creating a plist file for the LaunchDaemon to use on boot.


Upon entering the "nano" editor, type (or paste) the following lines.


Press Ctrl-O, Enter, then Ctrl-X to save and quit. Then you need to set the file's owner & permissions and load into the LaunchDaemon.


Finally, restart the Mac and MySQL should autostart. Remember to restart immediately.

Seeing that there weren't much show-stopping problems with OS X Yosemite 10.10.0, I decided to proceed with updating my Mac mini server's OS from OS X Mavericks 10.9.5. Experiences with the Mountain Lion - Mavericks update helped in getting the web server back up running again relatively quickly. The downtime was only about 2 hours. Not much of a drama to write about.

One problem I noticed is that MySQL does not automatically start on reboot, and it seems to be a known problem. I'll have to remember to manually restart it when I have to reboot the server.

Today marks the return of The Toon-Box, the comic that ran for four years from August 23, 2005 to July 29, 2009 and went into hiatus for more than four years since. With Comic Life software that made the comic possible available on iOS for some time, all it needed was motivation to resurrect the comic.

So yes, now the comic is fully created on my iPhone, and uploaded to the server. No need work on my Mac, since the photos are already on the iPhone anyway. Enjoy!

I've been wary of installing new OS upgrades on the server because it can easily mess up the custom configuration I set up. In fact, that was primarily the reason why my old iMac that ran my websites (including this one) until early this year ran Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) for 3 and a half years until it broke down. I passed upgrading to Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8 ) all that time. I ultimately moved to Mountain Lion only because the new Mac mini that replaced the iMac required it.

This time was different. I had simplified the server configuration and kept track of the modifications. Basically, it was down to a couple of configuration files for built-in Apache server, and a separate MySQL installation. Downloading Mavericks (10.9) from the Mac App Store was what took most of the time. It was released as a free upgrade from anything that ran Snow Leopard and up, so there was a huge demand. Once the download was complete, I ran the installer, and it took about half an hour to complete.

I noticed that the websites were broken after the installation, as expected. However, checking the changes revealed that I only needed to fix the main Apache server configuration file. A couple of minutes of fiddling with the file later, the websites came back working properly. This was easily the fastest and the most trouble-free transition to the new major OS X version ever.

As a bonus, Apple had decided to make iWork upgrades to the just-released latest version for free, regardless of whether it was bought on DVD or on Mac App Store. My old copy of iWork '09 installed from the disc got properly upgraded, and the apps now show up in purchases list. Free OS and office suite upgrade, and smooth server transition. Apple has spoiled me.