OpenVMS VAMP Board

I added a new page into the Wiki today and on saving it MYSQL crashed and wouldn't restart

I eventually managed to restart the daemon by adding the following line to MYSQL_ROOT:[VMS]MY.CNF,

[mysqld]
innodb_force_recovery = 2

I could than manually go into mysql and drop the wiki database,

mysql> drop database wikidb;

Next, set the recovery variable back to 0 and restart.

At this stage I have no idea if this was a fluke or if MediaWiki is doing something horrible to the tables and it is repeatable. At some stage I'll get around to trying it again. But please take heed of this error.

Check your tables (*except MySQL itself*) are INNODB. MyISAM on OpenVMS is known to corrupt your database.
If you followed the recommendations, your database should have InnoDB format on all tables by default, but I've noticed some packages to create tables using MyISAM in their databse-creation scripts. Either remove MyISAM from these scripts of change them to InnoDB.
Note that this will prevent your database get corrupted but it may crash nevertehless. However, restart wil be no problem

Try downloading the newest MYSQL 5.1 from http://www.pi-net.dyndns.org/

It is much more stable than the earlier releases.

MediaWiki is not crashing it, although there are some other packages that cause it to crash. JFP has a forum set-up with more information.

http://www.pi-net.dyndns.org/piforum/index.php

It may be more stable, which is good. It's probably substantially bigger than MySQL 1.4 as well, and where my box is relatively small, to modern standards, that is, I wonder if it leaves room for other memory consumers like a web server and code executed by it (PHP and Python, in my case) - and still allow other services like ant-spam and SMTP, POP and other services, backup and watchdogs, with acceptable performance.
(I'll ask JFP )


If you have trouble with MySQL, look for alternatives. I know there are other wiki's that run on VMS, even without a database (MoinMoin that I use, is a Python applicationa nd dos not require a database. It's fast - once it's started