Evil software

The night before last I installed a much newer version of the software I use for my online photo album. I have been using Gallery 1.5.x and I upraded to Gallery 2.2.2. Instead of actually upgrading my old installation, I installed the newer version by itself. This required that I create a new MySQL database on my ISP's server. I have done this before so it was no problem. The new photo album software worked great, everything is cool. Not !! The next morning I discovered that my Wordpress software as well as my MovableType software both could not connect to their databases. So I initiated a support ticket online with my ISP to see if they could fix the problem. I will leave out the details but the next day, after many more emails and two online chat sessions with customer support, my applications were still not working.

Exasperated, I called their 800 support number and talked to a real person. My problem was fixed within hours. It seems that if I use the same username for all my MySQL databases, they all need to have the same password. What happened was that when I installed the new MySQL database I used a different password than I had used for the other two databases. The new password was automatically replicated to the two existing databases, causing the applications to not be able to connect any longer as their config files had the old passwords in them. I should have know better because I received an error message when creating the new database about using the same username. If I had used a different username there would have never been a problem. I guess the older I get the dumber I get.

But I have to hand it to the guys at Bluedomino who finally fixed the problem. They were very gracious and refrained from calling me a dumb user. My hat's off to the customer support staff at Bluedomino for putting up with this old dummy.