Happy Thanksgiving!
This Thanksgiving I had a wonderful idea! Let’s upgrade my iMac from Leopard to Snow Leopard. Why you ask? Let’s start with some history.
I have a 20″ iMac that is our home computer. This machine hosts a Windows VM that is our Exchange server for email. I also would like to have our iPads print to our local printers. That requires some software and Snow Leopard. Right now I have it configured on a MacBook Pro, but that machine sometimes goes to sleep, or sometimes I find I leave it in a state where we can’t get to it. Because of that, I figured I could move the printing duties to the iMac also. With Thanksgiving day upon us and time to do this, I made the leap to upgrade to Snow Leopard.
All the while red flags were going off, but I couldn’t remember why 
After the upgrade finished, everything seemed fine. The VM came up and I was able to log in, and it could see the internet. I grabbed my iPhone to check to make sure email was working. That is when I remeber why the red flags were going off.
The iPhone would not connect, and I remember that I didn’t upgrade the iMac because I would have to get the Apache settings configured again. No turning back now. I ventured into the /etc/apache2 directory to find all my config files were back to default. Gah!
I got a bad feeling inside. I knew that my wife would check email soon, and she would get an error and then call me to ask why it’s not working. Not to mention, I was now short on time since we had to leave to go to the family gathering for Thanksgiving.
I quickly got my Macbook and checked to verify that I could access the iMac remotely. I could investigate this later. I got that sorted, and we were out the door. I explained to the wife what I did, and that I would work on it at the family’s house.
Once there, I got connected to my iMac and decided to got to the root / and ‘find’ for any httpd.conf files anywhere. Maybe there is a chance I had copied it somewhere else. After a while of searching with no good possibilities, a ray of hope! One of the volumes that was mounted was my Time Machine backup. ‘Find’ found an httpd.conf down in the time machine database. Luckily, Time machine keeps the file in the database as file on disk. I could simply copy my old configs back. I did that, and restarted apache and everything was working great!
Thank you Time Machine! Thanks for backing up the file, and thanks for allowing me to use normal search tools to find my data, and to simply copy the data I want normally. No Backup software to restore etc… All works properly from a remote shell!
