Sorry man, I was out of town (actually up in your neck of the woods) when this all hit the fan. But this indeed does suck. I'm glad you moved away from WebHostPlus, however. I had nothing but trouble with them when they bought out a GREAT company (dinix.com) I *was* hosting with. They ended up nearly bulldozing my site for a few days, and thanks to some insider information, I was able to get it off the server before the fit hit the shan. Otherwise my site (and all the sites I hosted) would've been totally down for 48 hours (as I monitored my old server during the process).

And I was just catching up on my blog reading, was having a problem with some odd ball code on my site, noticed your post on the SixApart forum that you'd been hacked, and thought "Oh crap."

But glad to hear you're back up and running, even if it isn't full yet. Next time you need a place to park the domain or site, I have plenty of server place and have helped out several bloggers in central Oregon.

So do you have *any* of your old archives in some sort of data format so they can be converted into MT's import format? If I can do anything to help, you have my e-mail address. While I'm not an MT genius, I do know my way around a bit. It's mostly that I am a lazy person and don't want to have to look in two different places for archives :-)

Jake: Will XML files do any good for MT import? Jack

Hmmm...XML files might help (I'm assuming you're probably talking your RSS feeds, right?). I'm sure there's a XML-to-MySQL script out there that could get it into the format that's needed for MT's database (I know a programmer that could do it, I just don't know how much it would cost), but it's not something I could whip right out. Did you RSS feeds have full entries (I couldn't rememeber) and do you have a comment XML feed (as the comments are just as entertaining sometimes as the entries)?

the comments are just as entertaining sometimes as the entries

Sometimes more so -- much more.

There are a bunch of xml files with individual entry numbers on them, but they have only part of each entry (and parts of each comment).

I know my blog has created a MySQL database on the old server, but I don't know how to access it. There's a directory /cgi-bin/mt/db, but it appears to be empty.

The comments are attached only to the individual post entries. If you're in one of the other directories, click on the time stamp of the post you're reading, and up will come the comments.

Hmmm...WordPress might be helpful here. It's really great at extracting old MT data (they have a conversion process that they boast takes five minutes - my old MT blog took 10, but only because I had tons of old posts/comments) and/or importing data in different formats.

Then you might be able to import the data back into your new MT installation. Seems like a kludgy way to go, but it might be of use here. And WP has a free .com version of their software (hosted elsewhere); I'll head over now to see if it might be of use.

I know my blog has created a MySQL database on the old server, but I don't know how to access it. There's a directory /cgi-bin/mt/db, but it appears to be empty.

Yeah, that dir is irrelevant to using MySQL with MT. It's where the databse would have been if you'd been using Berkeley DB instead. Just what sort of access do you still have to the old hosting site? Did they ever give you direct access to their MySQL or just set up a database for you?

(Then again, maybe you know what was in your original MT configuration in terms of database host/user/databsename/password, someone might be able to figure out how you can extract the data from the DB, if it's even still there.)

They never gave me access to the MySQL, I don't think. Right now I can get to the files that I did work with, via ftp and even http. I tried running mt.cgi, though, and it won't run.

I don't know the database name, but I am sure I used whatever the default was in MT 2.6. I'm not competent to change it!

There wasn't a default. But there should be something set up in MT's cgi directory in mt-config and mt-db-pass. Not that you should post whatever that might be here, obviously, but there should be something(s) in those files which provide the DB info.

Mainly, I'm wondering if one of us can work with you to put those values into a web-based MySQL configuration app, if we might be able to connect to their MySQL and dump the data from the database, if it's still there.

Oh cripes -- you still had a 2.6 install. b!x is right about the data directory not doing anything. The tables have gotten quite a bit more complicated since 2.6. But if you can get a MySQL data dump from your previous host, that'd be perfect.

Did you have access to a control panel at your old host? I think that your old host uses cPanel, but they could be using plesk or ensim. Anyway, in that control panel (if you still can get access to it) should be a link for phpMyAdmin. Get in there, and find the export link, and that'll get you all your links and comments. Then it would probably just need to be tweaked slightly to get into the MT 3.3 format, but I'm sure it can be done.

b!x's last comment is slightly incorrect -- in the 2.x branch of MT, the bulk majority of the configuration options are in the mt.cfg file, not mt-config.cgi file (they moved to that in 3.x, if I remember correctly). There you'll be able to find the database name and database username. The password is stored in mt-db-pass.cgi, like b!x said.

(And I agree about the comments being better -- I just didn't want to say that in case you took offense :-).