Month: May 2007

Slow
The new blog on the bootcamp seems to taking a lot of resorces, it seems that other users than the administartor need more patience- it’s so slow!. For no appearant reason – that’s ever worse. See what I can do to beat it. At least, I’m with the experts this week!

Mysql crashed
Just after having posted the previous entry, MySQL_Server crashed:
InnoDB: Thread 109671168 stopped in file MYSQL_ROOT:[innobase.btr]btr0pcur.c;1
%CMA-F-EXIT_THREAD, current thread has been requested to exit
%TRACE-F-TRACEBACK, symbolic stack dump follows
image module routine line rel PC abs PC
%TRACE-F-TRACEBACK, symbolic stack dump follows
%TRACE-I-END, end of TRACE stack dump
%CMA-F-EXIT_THREAD, current thread has been requested to exit
PTHREAD$RTL 0 000000000004381C FFFFFFFF80A6181C
PTHREAD$RTL 0 000000000006EB58 FFFFFFFF80A8CB58
0 FFFFFFFF8016EDF4 FFFFFFFF8016EDF4
0 FFFFFFFF80374E0C FFFFFFFF80374E0C
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 00000000001D1094 FFFFFFFF80C65094
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 00000000001D0D5C FFFFFFFF80C64D5C
0 FFFFFFFF801873EC FFFFFFFF801873EC
0 FFFFFFFF801873EC FFFFFFFF801873EC
----- above condition handler called with exception 0000000C:
%SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, access violation, reason mask=00, virtual address=00000000000
----- end of exception message
0 FFFFFFFF800A90CC FFFFFFFF800A90CC
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 0000000000106DB4 FFFFFFFF80B9ADB4
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 0000000000106FB0 FFFFFFFF80B9AFB0
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 00000000001417C4 FFFFFFFF80BD57C4
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 0000000000140B68 FFFFFFFF80BD4B68
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 000000000013A5F4 FFFFFFFF80BCE5F4
mysqld MY_PTHREAD sigwait 23808 0000000000000408 00000000003C5108
mysqld mysqld signal_hand 86616 0000000000002AE8 0000000000232AE8
PTHREAD$RTL 0 000000000005773C FFFFFFFF80A7573C
PTHREAD$RTL 0 0000000000043940 FFFFFFFF80A61940
0 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
PTHREAD$RTL ? ?
0 FFFFFFFF80375CE4 FFFFFFFF80375CE4
%TRACE-I-END, end of TRACE stack dump
I noticed earlier is was slow – would that have been a symptom of something going wrong?

MyIsam tables found
I found that there are a few tables in the database based on MyISAM where the default used is InnoDB (because MyIsam seems to have some issues on VMS – so I was told – so therefore, I keep to InnoDB). I know where they come from: I trues the SLY30 template and that requires a particular plugin – which caused problems on the WordPress Admin pages. This needs to be looked at, because the template is very nice and I’d like to use it.
I may need an updated PHP engine – as well. Something to ask next week.

Bootcamp ahead
Next week, I’ll be at the openVMS Bootcamp in Nashua to learn even more. I created a blog to cover the event so if you want the see what’s it all about, visit the bootcamp blog.
That doesn’t mean the systems are left unattended. I can have a look, as I do on a daily basis, over the Internet so any hacking attempt will be noticed.

Python
Jean-Francois Pieronne – the same guy that ports MySQL to VMS – has ported Python to run on VMS as well, with a bunch of libraries. He has been investigating a port of a kind of Wiki to VMS and in that project, he created two disk containers to ease the installation of the required libraries, Python amnd the Python-based Wiki called MoinMoin.
I couldn’t resist and had to install them, certainly when Mark Daniel released his Python RunTime Engine for WASD (as a dot-zero release – he warned us!).
After some shifting around in the configuration and doing something I should have done from the beginning when seeting things up (namely: reading the installation guide properly – I completely overlooked one commandprocedure to be run if the installation was to be done system wide, not just for the rpocess…) I got the test-scripts working.
Running the Wiki would now be easy – but I lacked the time to do it.
Web backup
This weekend, I made an image backup of the web disk. Just in case.

Crashed Disk
Last Tuesday – May 1st, at about 14:10 – the disk containing the webs and web-database crashed, and I only came to signal it on Wednesday morning. All of a luck, the public site and the database were backed up the night before, and I had a backup of the disk, though outdated. No backup of the private area, so I lost the logs archive. Pity, but a real problem.
This disk had given some problems before, just signalling errors but still available. So first I tried to recover is again – but this time the disk seems to be totally broken indeed.

So the first issue is to replace the disk and recover the (outdated) data, so the main structure had been repaired. This took a rather long time (there are really big files – the disk containers – and speed is only (!) 10Mb/second) and in the mean time I tried to figure out what went wrong and when. The latter was easy to locate, looking into the logfile: there should be messages of a disk be taken offline. Most notably however was the loss of LD devices: the disk containers containg database and webs!
After the disk had been restored, I mounted it and restored the public web (that was backed up on Monday night) and changed the home page to have the blog and forums not accessable: restoring the database and re-installing the software had to wait.

On Thursday, there was no time to complete this due to company requirements.

On Friday night, I started restoring the database. Pushing Monday’s backup into the one that came from the disk backup didn’t work at all, so I did a “re-install” of MySQL. That is: just starting it as if newly installed: created a new database, added privileged users and after that, ran the SQL-file that is the result of the backup procedure. This want perfectly and was done within minutes. Next, I re-installed PHPMyAdmin (which caused an update to the latest version), WordPress and PBPBB2. PHPMyAdmin went on without a problem, WordPress wanted to do an update and then had no porblem at all, and PHPBB2 failed.

On Friday night, I had the blog running again – so I could enter this post (to make a start, saved it as draft) and see if I could get on with the forums. That was started on Saturday night, but neither the basic one (used to test and investigate) nor the Dutch OpenVMS forums could be started. Both gave an error on any access.
This morning, I realized that the theme I used for the Dutch OpenVMS forums, was still missing so I installed it – and had to redo some editing to the frontpage image. but after that, it ran as before. The primary site remains in error and I don’t know what’s wrong. I contacted the PHPBB2 support forum, just wait and see. It’s not that imortant 🙂

Now the links on the home page could be restored, and for the normal user, all seems back to normal. On the operator side there is still some work to do, but that entry needed an overhaul anyway.