Don't leave it "mgarage" for 13 years...
It is now 18 characters long, consisting of mixed upper/lower case letters, numerals, and symbols. According to a security site, my old password could be hacked in about 1/4 second, while the new one will take several trillion years. As long as I don't just give it away again... *
I got hacked, and the password was changed, so not only didn't my web sites work, but I couldn't get to them to change the password, because my Mac kept FTPing with the old password, which eventually caused my IP to be blocked.
Where I typically have around 9,000 files on my server (across several web sites), I was maxed out at 250,000 files. It took days, once I got in, to figure out what was good and what wasn't. I pretty much nuked everything, and copied in what I had locally. But much of the avon-weather.com site is server-side, so that was fun. Most of the extra stuff was scattered around in various directories on that site. HostDime, my provider, was excellent to work with.
A few days later it was clean, and my two very basic sites were back. A few days later, a basic avon-weather site was up, and today I rebuilt the Steel Series portion, much of which is server-side. Thanks Mark, for great instructions, and John for keeping the wiki updated.
The only thing non-functional now is my anemometer, which I will replace in the spring. It was a PITA getting up on the second roof line ten years ago. At 68, I'm gonna let my soon to be son-in-law do it for me.
* In hindsight, I think it was my own fault. After telling everyone I know never to click on a link in an email message, I then clicked on the "data space exceeded" link that was supposedly from my hosting company. I logged in and found there wasn't a problem after all. Except that I just handed my login credentials to whomever was really behind the fake email... ::smacks forehead::
