Okay. So one of our users approached me today, asking for help.
When I ask them what with (of course, I need to know what they need help with, to help them, right?), they said, “MT“.
Some of you know of my automatic reflex to those letters.
I suppressed most of it, said,
(12:26:11) Xial: I’ll regret this later when I scrub my hands with acid, but what can I unbreak with MT?
and started working on it.
The time stamp is important.
Okay. So I’m sitting here, digging around with settings, looking at permissions and owners, and most of the things of that nature. I stop for a bit, because it was irritating me. That inspires this post so that I could get myself calmed down. (I need to fix times here.)
That was the hour marker.
Shortly thereafter, I log on to Freenode, and make comical remarks about having to help someone upgrade MT in #wordpress. A few of the WP users were ex-MT users, and offered me a few tips.
I continue to dick around with it, and then suggest that we try upgrading to see what happens.
They goes along with it, so I go to mt-org to get the latest version…
Only to find out that I have to register to even get the download done.
A few moments later, I thank bug me not for existing, and grab myself a copy of 2.661 and 3.16.
Problem.
Lynx sucks.
The downloads I did with Lynx were shot to hell. I had to run my local server, and grab the files off my desktop so that I didn’t have to sftp them up.
It’s 3 pm.
I’m reading the upgrade nodes for 2.661, and put files in their place.
Tried MT for them again.
That failed to build indexes as well.
I went to 3.16, did the upgrade script dance, and tried that.
At first, that failed.
(15:34:55) Xial: Okay. This is ridiculous. 2.661 fails. 3.16 fails. Something is up, and I have got to get to the bottom of it.
I dig around and play with settings.
I try rebuilding once more.
This is where the magic happens:
Renaming tempfile '/path/to/archives/2005_04_20.html.new' failed:
Renaming '/path/to/archives/2005_04_20.html.new' to '/path/to/archives/2005_04_20.html' failed: Disc quota exceeded
This is when I got the clue:
Check their quota, dumbass.
Sure enough…
(15:47:49) Xial: You know what?
(15:47:56) Xial: I think I might have just found your problem.
(15:48:01) Them: What?
(15:48:06) Xial: I’m checking now to be sure.
(15:48:10) Them: Is it really stupid?
(15:48:24) Xial: Yes.
(15:48:31) Them: -_-;;
(15:48:42) Xial: You have a 550 MB RAR archive in your home directory.
That pushed the user over quota.
Lessons learned for the day:
- If a user says they can’t get something to output to their directory, check their quota!
- If you’re a user, and you’ve gotta upload a big file here, kindly let me or Gushi know.
Fun stuff, eh? 
And then, it was 4 pm.