Comments on: Technical Assistance Required

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 05:52:20 +0000

OK, I figured out what was wrong. And thanks to the several people here (and more via email) who offered suggestions and help. It was a tricky problem because while all the symptoms were that the DB was corrupted, this wasn’t the problem after all. It seems that, perhaps due to a machine upgrade at Dreamhost (though I’m still not sure), I was no longer able to run cgi as an Apache module. The cgi daemon had started running as ‘dhapache’ rather than as my userid, and so began generating permissions errors when it tried to access the database and other things. This presented symptoms of database corruption. Changing the cgi setup from the apache module to a straightup PHP-CGI arrangement fixed the problem—- Dreamhost runs scripts with suexec and this meant the daemon was under my userid again. A few further fixes to the permissions (to keep suexec happy) and lo the database errors disappeared. I was tearing my hair out for 24 hours before I figured this out, however.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Sat, 28 Feb 2004 05:27:58 +0000

It was a Berkeley DB disaster that led me to shift over to Brad Choate’s hosting. He’s still offering space and if anyone can rescue you, I’m sure he can.

By: Curtiss Leung

Curtiss Leung — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 19:24:16 +0000

Try MT-Medic. I had a similar problem with a group weblog where NO ONE could log in; this lill’ feller fixed it right good.

By: bandiera

bandiera — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:38:41 +0000

This sounds fer-miliar. Have you recently created another blog, or logged on as a user to another blog? If you ever let MT save your details as a cookie, you can get behaviour similar to this. It happened to me, and I did a lot of the troubleshooting you indicated above before I realised what the problem was. It was easy to solve – just delete the MT cookie and you can log in again.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 16:06:53 +0000

to be honest, I think your only way out is to change your name, move to a different state and start up a new blog. It’ll be easier.

By: Adam Rice

Adam Rice — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 15:57:53 +0000

As he said in the original post, they’re not using SQL. They’re using Berkeley DB.

By: chiggins

chiggins — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 15:18:20 +0000

I’m not tremendously experienced with sleepycats, but i imagine there’s a dump utility that will dump all your tables into SQL, ya might try that as far as getting your data out into a readable file (suitable for importing into MySQL as well). Also, I’d open up whatever log BDB is using and tail it while trying to do an operation in MT to see if you can find any “permission denied” type messages (as it could be something as simple as write perms).

By: paul

paul — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:51:32 +0000

If you make the old db directory (all of it) available for download, it should be trivial for someone (I’ll do it, if you like) to set up and MT instance, swap in your db files, and then export it for you to reuse in a MySQL based instance.

By: coder

coder — Fri, 27 Feb 2004 14:30:28 +0000

OK, so you can see all your data using his script? In that case you should be fine. All we need to do is get the script to generate SQL directly, or munge the output into SQL, whichever is easier. As I don’t have a MT DB database here to test on, could you post or email a representative sample of the output the script produces?