Development, Politics, Pop Culture

After a weekend of shooting overnights, I checked the e-mail linked up to my WordPress to find a bunch of lovely comments and trackbacks for my post about Al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine.  Being the first post to this blog, I was ecstatic!

But before I had a chance to approve them, my server crashed.

My server is through Slicehost and I love the freedom I get to tinker around.  Slicehost doesn’t come with much in-person support, since they assume you know what you’re doing.  They also have a slew of helpful articles on basic and advanced server-y stuff.

I’ve only had problems with them after I installed Horde a few months ago.  I was trying to use Horde as a groupware solution after getting into an argument with the support arm of Google Apps for business (long story).  But after installing Horde, something would fork endlessly and eat up all my server’s memory.  I would end up having to hard reboot my server to get everything back up again.

Now, months later, the same thing happened (though I’m not sure it was a memory leak).  I was in the middle of approving comments when everything went down.  After I did a hard reboot, I found all my comments were gone in WordPress.  After a quarter hour of cursing and tearing my hair out in frustration, I went to fix the problem.

Luckily, MySQL and phpMyAdmin are super robust.  When I logged into my phpMyAdmin page, I found that the WordPress comments table was corrupt.  My hard reboot must have come right as MySQL was updating the comments table (i.e. marking pending comments as approved).  To repair a corrupt table (and get comments back), you can click the checkbox next to said corrupt table and select “Repair” in the dropdown operations menu at the bottom of the table summary.  If you’re not seeing the table summary, make sure you’re in the “Structure” tab.  Here’s a visual link.

Repairing the comments table brought all my comments back for approval, which was something I wasn’t expecting.  I figured they would have been lost when I hard rebooted.  Thank you MySQL and phpMyAdmin!