Right in the middle of NaNoWriMo, the server got the hiccups.

First, the blogs stopped responding. Then the main site went down. I did what any stressed dev might do and restarted the server.

Bad mistake!

The MySQL server refused to come back up. Just totally refused.

After some time I found an error log file that had gotten a bit big. I removed it but the server still reported a file space problem.

What?

Okay, stay calm.

I will not panic, I will not panic…

PANIC!!!!

It turns out that sometimes you also need to restart services that were using the file so they give the space back. I’m sure there is a good reason for that but… Right now I am no fan of that feature. Actually, that’snot true. I know exactly why things work like that and it is a really good design. It comes up so infrequently that I had forgotten about it.

Anyway panic over I restarted the database and everything was fine, right?

No of course not.

One of the blogs – my blog – had a corrupted table and so was still acting like it was down.

I tried not to headbutt my nice new desk and ran the table repair. MySQL has this “magical” ability to fix itself if you “ask really nicely”.

Panic over…

Note to self, get with migrating your older stuff that makes big log files to something a bit less aggressive.

The image used for this post was first used by one of our bloggers. It seemed apt.