I'm struggling to even explain this question in an efficient way. But here goes:
A. computer repair customer of mine has hired me to get his website working again.
Someone else, years ago, set up a linux virtual machine on some vm hosting site, and that machine is running MovableType.
Customer has login access through the web to the hosting account, and to the movabletype backend. But we have no direct access to the virtual machine. Customer is not tech savvy and the original guy that set it up, has no info about it and has stopped returning our calls.
In the end, rather than spending forever trying to figure all of this out, I'd be content if there was some way I could just export all of his posts, and then we can set up a new website in a more traditional, managed webhost model, and upload all of the old posts, and then continue making new posts.
Also the homagepage of the site won't work, I'm pretty sure the virtual server has been hacked since it has never had any security updates of any kind, both in movabletype and in ubuntu itself.
We are on MovableType Personal v4.1, which I'm sure is ancient. In the admin panel, I see all sorts of tools for creating new posts, but I can't see anything regarding exporting old posts in any form.
Even an SQL dump would probably work, but we can't connect to the server through SSH (which I am working on but no luck yet).
Worst case is copy and pasting each post, one at a time, into a newly setup blog. But I'm trying to avoid that.
The hosting company doesn't let you directly download backups or snapshots of the virtualhost, which is a shame. There really are very few options here but it feels like there should be a little more than there are.
