Re: mysqld wont start...

Johan Lindquist wrote:
So anyway, it was like, 18:27 CEST Jul 30 2008, you know? Oh, and, yeah,
The Natural Philosopher was all like, "Dude,
Johan Lindquist wrote:

[..]

If nothing else, a small UPS will save your hardware somewhat from
being worn out prematurely by power surges and intermittent voltage
drops.
In this case its somewhat unusual, since there are men in orange
jackets outside, who installed a generator for this house and one
other, while they dig up a high voltage cable thats gone faulty.
This has made the normally reliable house wiring extremely sensitive
to variable loads tripping the RCD.

Oh, well, that's fine then. I'm sure the power company will leave your
lines alone from now on. Excellent thinking, for sure.

But seriously, dude. Proactive thinking really is all the rage these
days, even in businesses that strive to make a profit. Several people
have suggested you take a hint from this, but I guess if you're that
stubborn it just takes a few more incidents to figure it out for
yourself. Good luck, though!

dear boy, I have been running unix servers for years, and until we could afford it and such things existed, none bar one ever died beyond recovery on a power outage, and that was an ancient and overloaded SCO unix 386 box, which got a brownout when booting. It mashed enough of its primary hard disk system to be not worth restoring and we took the data from the second disk and put it on another machine..

Experience, rather than opinion, shows that what kills boxes is bad disks, and/or bad memory. Not losing power.

The only times I have lost PC's or *nix machines have been when power goes down *when booting them*. As happened in this case due to a very unusual combination of events.

Because by and large that is the only time data is being accessed in bulk.

A UPS cannot generally hold power through a protracted power cut anyway. Nor without extensive rewiring would it hold up the switches and routers here, that are pretty much mandatory for the server to operate as a live internet site, which is what it does.

At best it allows an orderly shutdown.

This server has been up since February 2006: in that time it has lost power dozens of times. It has always recovered completely. This time not only did it lose power on reboot, it also died from dust in its fans. That may have actually caused the problem rather than loss of power. It was one of those days when everything goes wrong.

It took me 1/2 hour to blow the dust out, and get it cool enough to boot: everything came up except the Mysqld. It took me 4 hours to repair that. So 4/12 hours of work, possibly not even due to power failure, just dust build up.


It would take me more than 4 1/2 hours to order up, and rewire and get shutdown procedures implemented.

A more recent backup might have been better, but in this case the data lost was just 4 mysql users..hardly onerous to repair.

I guess I could have spent a week implementing a UPS at a couple of hundred quid, and an hour a week backing up onto a quids worth of DVD..so in 2 1/2 years that would have been what 220 quids worth of DVDs, plus 200 quid of UPS, plus 250 hours of labour..to protect against an event that happens every 2 1/2 years, and takes an 4 1/2 hours to fix?

If you think that is vaklue for money, like I said, don't ask me for a job. Risk cost benefit analysis, shows it wasn;t worth it.

What I SHOULD have done is noticed some error messages..and maybe blown the fans out sooner. That would have stopped that issue.

UPS are not the total answer to power supply issues, and power supply issues are not the only reason that machines crash.

Backups are worth doing, and it may be that a second disk in the machine, to part mirror it, is a way to go. That would neither be costly not time consuming.

Or I could get the old DEll RAID server I have doing nothing and configure that as backup..take longer tho.








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