08.20.11
There is nothing wrong with your TV set
Readers may have noticed DD blog went wonk yesterday afternoon.
WordPress’s MySQL database handling on Yahoo is not particularly robust.
In fact, it’s a regular effort to keep the database from going bad. It’s just a matter of how bad things go and when the software decides to warn you by — soonest, or latest — by crashing.
Short story, the “post” table was corrupted, starting sometime earlier in the week. But it didn’t crash hard until Friday after the last Ted Nugent post.
This set off an immediate scramble to repair it, a task the administrative tools — which regularly work — politely declined to do.
So an emergency rollback restore from back-up was done. And that took the blog back to the 13th. Which isn’t a particularly big loss of data.
However, it’s annoying. And during the process of repairing it I was informed, rather helpfully — I might add, by Yahoo tech support that it’s not an uncommon problem with WordPress installations here. Which is why they have a good procedure to help people get back up off the ground.
Which surprised the heck at out of me. Because nothing like it was in place back when I first started using WordPress here and the blog editor crashed and couldn’t be revived, forcing a migration back to Blogger.
Which is another old painful story, recapped here.
Computing in the cloud. Fun, fun, fun ’til daddy takes the d’base away.
Frank said,
August 21, 2011 at 9:32 am
This happened to be several years ago when I still self-hosting. I lost weeks of inconsequential drivel.
Because I could, since I had root access to the server, which was in my office/guest room, i wrote a script to run daily backups. I’ve been considering calling tech support at my provider to see whether I could implement something like that.
George Smith said,
August 21, 2011 at 9:53 am
Yahoo doesn’t allow command line access to the mysql server and you can’t get to the database from the directory structure they allow you to see.
You can install myphpadmin but my experience has been that it worked better on Yahoo a year ago than it does now. I used to use it to make backups of the database but it frequently glitched. And on Friday it completely broke down — wouldn’t do anything with the posts table. Yahoo also allows use of myisamchk through a wizard but there’s no way to tell if it’s working, no error messaging.
And all this is why they’ve gone to providing emergency rollback backup. More than a year ago they didn’t offer any support for WordPress database problems. But they’re pretty frequent now, I was told, so now they do it although it isn’t advertised.
They also have a wizard you can punch to do your own backups but it’s now obvious they have an even larger safetynet, which is good and – it seems — rare.
If you read out to the link at the reg on my WordPress problem, that experience made me vow I’d never again use the WP forums to ask for help. The crowdsourcing nonsense which everyone tries to substitute as an on call ‘help’ desk is just a reservoir of pain and punishment. Like all crowdsourcing, IMHO.
Yeah, let the crowd decide whether you need help and how to dispense it. That was effin’ brilliant from a sociopathic pount of view..