Live & Direct from Nowhere in Particular...

After posting The Cellar… last night, I noticed that the background on the direct link page wasn’t loading properly. Upon scrolling down a bit it turns out it was because the captcha for the comments was ganked. Apparently a table in the database was missing. I still have no idea how, other than that it likely happened during one of the forced reboots of the server my sites are hosted on.

I submitted a ticket to my host. And waited. Tired of waiting I contacted them via Live Support. After 2 hours of working with the tech, the problem still was not fixed and the following had occurred:

1. I tried to back up the ganked database before messing with it and could not due to some flaky backup scripts in the backoffice. So, the tech backed it up for me.
2. Found that my most recent database backup was bad for the same reason. No worry, it’s a static table, so I went back one from there (about 2 weeks old).
3. Attempted to restore the backup via phpMyAdmin, which errored out, apparently a 27MB database is too much for it to handle. No biggie, uploaded the file to have the technician restore the missing table.
4. The tech restored the entire database rather than the missing table. 2 weeks of blog entries gone. Good thing I made him make a backup.
5. Backup Restored.
6. Told the technician “Nevermind, I’ll take care of it myself.” Submitted 2 more tickets for the phpMyAdmin error and backup script issue. Went to bed.

This morning I checked on the tickets and the responses were only partially useful. It seems that any database with a table with over a certain number of records will cause phpMyAdmin to timeout as configured on the Site5 servers. So, the suggestion was to do it via the command line. I wasn’t looking forward to reading the manpages on mySQL’s command line utility, but luckily one of the techs gave me a sample command line in one of the ticket replies. So, I did the following (in about 15 minutes, which is what should have happened last night):

1. Using the command line, restored the backup of the database to a new database (it took less than a minute, so I have no idea why phpMyAdmin couldn’t handle it).
2. Used phpMyAdmin to export the missing table from the restored database.
3. Used phpMyAdmin to import the missing table to the active database.

So, now comments work again, no thanks to Site5’s flakey backoffice & mySQL configuration, and little thanks to their support technicians. Though Nick Zeljkovic (Site5 System Administrator) does deserve some thanks for the magical command line to import the database.