Posts Finally Working!

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Blogging, Geekery

Last night I real­ized that some­thing was Wrong with this blog. Sev­eral days of posts hadn’t, and I couldn’t even leave a com­ment on an old post. The error mes­sage I was get­ting (data­base access denied) made no sense.

The MySQL infor­ma­tion hadn’t changed. I tried chang­ing the data­base pass­word and updat­ing the set­tings — nope, no good. I could view the db in php­myad­min, and it was just fine. I could back up the data­base there, and change things, and I was using the same login infor­ma­tion. So why couldn’t Word­Press do anything?

We’ve been using 1&1 for at least a year or so now, I think, and haven’t had any real com­plaints. I hate call­ing anybody’s tech sup­port, but they’re usu­ally bet­ter than most, as they haven’t out­sourced that to India. Reluc­tantly, I finally called.

If you ever call 1&1 and “Grace” answers, just hang up and try again. Bet­ter yet, keep her tied up on the phone and try from another line, just to be sure you’ll get some­one else. She sim­ply can’t under­stand Eng­lish well enough to func­tion in any job that requires tele­phone inter­ac­tion, and her tech­ni­cal skills seem to be abysmal (it was hard to tell, con­sid­er­ing the lan­guage issue). I was on the phone for more than 90 min­utes, and couldn’t get any­where. I kept ask­ing to speak to her super­vi­sor, and she kept being obstructionist.

She asked me to spell the name of the affected domain (tech​nomom​.com) over and over and over again. I did so, very slowly and clearly, at least five times. What did she do? Inform me that gbn​com​.com was work­ing just fine, and ask me what error mes­sage I was getting!

Other than the fact that the end in .com, do you find any sim­i­lar­ity in those names?

I finally got her to this site, where the errors were clearly vis­i­ble to every vis­i­tor. Then, finally, she started talk­ing about esca­lat­ing the prob­lem to some­one else. She wasn’t sure who, though, and claimed that nobody there can make out­bound calls, so she couldn’t have that per­son (or her super­vi­sor) call me back. More hold­ing. Thanks God­dess for unlim­ited cell min­utes! I really, really need to get a head­set, though, as I was in more and more pain from sim­ply hold­ing the telephone.

At nearly 5, “Glen” finally got on the phone. He said he has no input regard­ing the hir­ing of “advi­sors” like “Grace.” If the sup­posed super­vi­sor doesn’t, who does? In any case, he finally pin­pointed the prob­lem: the data­base was full. To be accu­rate, it was more than full, 47mb over the size limit!

Hon­estly, I hadn’t checked that. But how could that hap­pen? And wouldn’t I get some kind of notice or warn­ing? Well, no, they don’t have any­thing in place to warn users when data­bases are get­ting too big. That seems like a ridicu­lously easy thing to put in place, but appar­ently it isn’t impor­tant to them.

I was aware of the 100mb limit 1&1 places on MySQL data­bases on our plan, but every time I’d looked at the usage, every data­base had 97mb free, or more! Blogs are mostly text! The images I do post aren’t even stored in MySQL!

After get­ting off the phone, I looked at the size of all each table. The cul­prit was the cache for the Joe Tan/​Silas Part­ners Flickr photo album plu­gin. I didn’t notice, when I installed an upgrade to the plu­gin, that it defaults to show­ing all of the Flickr groups you’re in. There’s no way that I can see to dis­able caching, either, and it seems that some­body browsed a lot of group pho­tos at some point over the week­end. Clear­ing that cache took me back to being way, way below the data­base size limit. If you use that plu­gin (which is great, BTW), check the settings!

So that’s why you’re see­ing my blog posts appear late. It’s bet­ter than “the dog ate my blog posts,” at least. Isn’t it?

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Permalink | November 13th, 2007

One Response to “Posts Finally Working!”

  1. Hope Says:
    November 13th, 2007 at 8:31 pm

    Instead, it’s MySQL ate my blog posts :)