Blog problems due to Upgrading to Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11 beta)
My blog has been down for the past 24 hours because I decided to upgrade my system to the Mac OS X El Capitan beta release. I first upgraded my Macbook Pro laptop which went smoothly. Unfortunately that wasn’t a good indicator for how the upgrade of my Mac Pro server would proceed.
The first problem was due to an old driver for my CalDigit FASTA-6GU3 (not Pro) PCIe card. After the first attempt to upgrade my server it consistently crashed while booting when it tried to load the USB driver for that card. After doing the upgrade a second time from a USB stick my server would boot; albeit reporting that it would not load the old unsigned kernel extension (kext) for that PCIe card.
Then I had to integrate my old Apache HTTP server config into the new default config file. At that point the Apache web server would again start and serve my static pages. Unfortunately it wouldn’t serve any WordPress page that required access to the MySQL database. Due to several red-herrings it took me a long time to realize that I was simply missing a symbolic link:
sudo mkdir /var/mysql sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
During the process of figuring out why WordPress couldn’t access my MySQL database I decided to update all my HomeBrew installed software (which included MySQL server). That meant several more hours debugging problems with HomeBrew. Starting with the need to update the Xcode developer tools to a beta version. Something it would have been nice if the El Capitan installer had warned me about.