SMF2 Forum Merger with FTP access

[James Gryphon]

This is a very specialized sort of question that I don't anticipate there will be much of a response to, but I thought I would at least try asking about it here, to properly exhaust our options before we waste time with more waiting.

I serve as an administrator on a certain web forum. We've been looking into doing a merger with an old established forum. We've pretty well worked out how to do that with the help of a tool discussed elsewhere here on this forum, but there's a serious hitch.

The webmaster is a reclusive and difficult to contact fellow, prone to disappearing weeks or months at a time. Although I'm an administrator at both forums, and have been granted FTP access to the old forum's files, SQL database access is only whitelisted to a couple of IP addresses, none of which are ours. To make the merger work, the plan was that we'd access the database directly and import the newer forum's information. Although he's promised he'd grant the whitelisting to a usable address, he hasn't done it yet, and with no recent contact with him the work's been stuck dead in the water for over a month.

We can access the database from the site itself (obviously, since the forum itself works fine). As before mentioned, I'm admin on the forum and have FTP access to its files. Is there any way of using these to get around the lack of direct SQL access and make the merger happen, or would we be best advised to just wait however long it takes for the webmaster to do his thing?

[Looking]

That is interesting. Besides FTP, do you by chance have access to shell? It will be easy to do it that way if not a good PHP script.

[Colin]

Easy upload phpmyadmin to the server point your browser there. Log into the database and download the dump of the DB.

[Illori]

Easy upload phpmyadmin to the server point your browser there. Log into the database and download the dump of the DB.

but that will only work if they know the database name and password, if they dont it will not work at all.

[Arantor]

If they have FTP access they can look at what's in Settings.php to get that.

[Illori]

If they have FTP access they can look at what's in Settings.php to get that.

we have not been told what software is being merged with what. we also dont know what FTP access has been granted, it could be to an attachments folder for all we know.

i think the op may mean by the subject 2 SMF 2.0.* forums or it could be 1 SMF 2.0.* forum and something else.

[James Gryphon]

I thought it'd be appropriate to drop in and give an update (I regret that I haven't always been the best about that before, no doubt frustrating some of the good people who have put time into my topics).

Colin's proposal worked beautifully. I had initially thought of trying something like that, but I wasn't aware of the right software to look to install (for some reason I was hooked on the idea of trying to install cPanel or something like that, which was of course not workable) and ended up dismissing the concept too quickly. With the tip to guide me, I managed to get it up A-OK.

Given that success it's probably not important to discuss the technical details much further, but for the sake of clarification, I did have full access to the forum files, including Settings.php, and the merger was between two SMF 2.0 forums (specifically, both running the newest version).

Thanks for all of your interest and help in this matter! You very possibly saved weeks or months of time, and like a great fruit-company CEO once stated, multiplied appropriately saving time is equivalent to saving lives.

[Colin]

Excellent, thanks for letting us know how it went.