On Wednesday something screwed up my mysql database that I have AbulWiki on. I didn’t notice until this morning though. By that time my daily backups had run twice, so I didn’t have a last good version. To say the least, I freaked out a little bit.

I’ve spent the last couple hours on it and I was able to start up mysql in a safe mode and do a data dump and I don’t think I’ve lost any data after all. Which is good. Very good. I also found a data dump I’d done ten days ago in another place. Also good. But what is bad is that I still can’t get mysql to start except in the read only safe mode. Which means I can’t make the wiki actually run of course.

According to the errors in the logs, the issue is a corruption in one of the InnoDB tables. The start up in innodb_force_recovery mode lets me do a mysqldump and get everything. And it looks like there is no actual data loss. But then it looks like the next step is supposed to be to drop the tables that are causing errors on start up, and then restore from your backup. But whenever I try to drop tables, mysql crashes and restarts and the tables are still there.

After running in circles, I’m starting to think I just want to wipe out mysql and reinstall from scratch, then restore my (hopefully) good dumps. The mysql dump I just did in safe mode is refusing to be read by MySQL Administrator due to character set issues. Hmmm…. The one from 10 days ago can be read. As can a backup I did using the Admin tool instead of doing mysqldump on the command line. Actually, both of those were done with the Admin tool rather than mysqldump. Sigh. In either case though, I can’t do jack until I can get mysql to start in regular mode rather than innodb_force_recovery mode.

And I am late to work. I need to go do work stuff now rather than bang my head on this.

But it seems clear what I’ll be doing tonight when I get home.

Fighting with mysql and hoping that these data dumps I’ve done are really usable and I haven’t lost anything (or at least not much). Looking at the mysqldump ones (which are human readable even if the GUI restore tool isn’t happy with them) they look OK, but…

Sigh.

Bleh.

Not happy Sam this morning.

Gotta go to work.

As we were driving home from an event at Amy’s school and approaching home Amy suddenly yelled “Dog!”. There was a dog darting around on the street near the local grocery store. We hadn’t seen it yet, only Amy had. But we stopped and Amy jumped out of the car. A few minutes later she had caught the loose dog (who was quite friendly). It had a tag. It was named “Nicky”. The tag had phone numbers. But all of our cell phones were dead. (Yeah, we need to be better at plugging them in to charge.) So Brandy called from a cell phone, but only got voice mail.

So Nicky came home for a little bit. Roscoe stayed down stairs and was not happy about this development at all. Almost as soon as we got the phones plugged in, the owner called us. A few minutes later they met us at the corner near our house and took Nicky back. Appearantly Nicky had wandered a little further from home than usual, but they often just let Nicky out to just wander around the neighborhood on his own. I’m not sure that is all that wise ever, let alone for a black dog at night who apperantly doesn’t mind running back and forth across streets with a decent amount of traffic.

But in any case, at least this time Nicky is home safe.

And we only had an extra dog for a few minutes.

Don’t you hate it when you spill coffee on your keyboard and a bunch of the keys get all sticky and hard to push?

Don’t you hate it more when you do that to two separate keyboards within the space of a week?

Yeah, that sucks.

For those of you who may be wondering, this week’s podcast was indeed recorded on Sunday. It hasn’t been released yet due to some technical difficulties preventing me from uploading it to the webserver where I keep my site (including the podcasts).

Related problems actually had the whole site down for about 14 hours earlier today, but it is obviously back up now. The podcast will follow as soon as my ability to move files around is restored.

Sometimes, things take a lot longer than you wish, and other times you have a lot less time than you wish. Most of the time both are true. And that kinda sucks.