MySQL'd! (Ow, my web site!)

One of the first things I do when I'm all ready to go is jump on our website to check for comments that are awaiting approval. Imagine my surprise when I got up this morning and found that it wasn't responding. So I try to login to it and it times out. Uh oh. Panic is starting to set in.

I run into the office and find it humming along, so I restart it (which I've been meaning to do anyway). It gives me some error about not being able to shutdown the FTP service and I'm thinking "no biggie". Then I get a big fat error when shutting down Apache, the web server. "Whoops, sorry. I can't load PHP because it can't find MySQL." Oh dandy.

You see, I upgraded MySQL about two weeks ago to get mailing lists working on our server. This usually terrifies me since upgrading from one major version to another rarely goes smoothly and I didn't want to nuke the server. I made a full backup of the website, and started the upgrade, restarted the program, and… everything works. I was very surprised.

I was more surprised this morning to find everything broken after not having changed anything for so long. I ended up finding out that I had to reinstall PHP to make things work again. While Portage is very good at checking to see what MySQL depends on when doing an upgrade, it fails to see what depends on MySQL. Our server is an old hand-me-down (PIII 800MHz with 256MB of RAM), it took about 45 minutes to rebuild.

Well, I had to leave it running as I left, and I found I couldn't connect to the server at home. I had to call up Shauna and have her restart the router. No, nothing. Then I have her check out IP address. Looks like Comcast decided to change that overnight, pretty much breaking everything.

Here it is, over 2 hours after I find the problem, and things are just starting to come back online. The idea of paying for hosting is sounding really good right now.