bob

OK, I’m not writing these posts with the expectation that any of my friends will want to read them, but in the hopes that they get into google and help some stranger somewhere solve a problem.

I installed lyceum blogging software (it’s a multi-user variant of wordpress) on my web server several weeks ago. It uses a mysql database as the backend. It worked fine for several weeks, until my server rebooted for the first time. After that, all my lyceum web pages were broken or had no content, and the lyceum error log had tons of entries more or less like this:

=====database error=====
Error#: 1033
Error: Incorrect information in file: ‘./uv_lyceum/options.frm’
Query: SELECT option_value FROM options WHERE option_domain = ’system’ AND option_name = ‘template’ LIMIT 1
========================

It turns out what happened is this: when I installed lyceum, it created its DBs using a mysql backend called innodb. A few weeks later I installed some other package (drupal I think) that suggested putting “skip innodb” in my /etc/my.cnf file. I did so, but it didn’t take effect because I didn’t restart mysqld. When my machine rebooted, mysql started in a state unable to deal with innodb files. That’s what caused the above, relatively uninformative, error message. All I had to do to fix it was comment out the skip innodb line in my.cnf, and restart mysqld.