• Backordering domain names.. #
• Jeff at Solidinternet.com support just saved my life. Thanks. #
• If you want to find out how dependent you are on your domain name just imagine nearly loosing it. I got a few more grey hair now. #
• Rejoicing that the problem with #wordpress tags and categories are gone. The problem were access right issues to /tmp. #
• Documented problems with #wordpress in new post http://bit.ly/184Lcn #
• Really liking the tooling for coding #android with @intellijidea so far. Now I just got to code away on my first app ;-) #
• Really not liking how blogtalkradio pretty much is a pain to subscribe and requires the html player rather than allowing easy donwload. #
• Not finding @twidroid Pro in the #android market here in Canada. #
• The #android market application should get features like bulk update from synaptic on #ubuntu. And a working search… #
• @sheaphillips don't despair ;-) in reply to sheaphillips #
• Anybody know if canonical will/does offer a hosted version of #launchpad for commercial use like #atlassian does jira studio.. #
• #scala and Model Driven Prototyping at the upcoming September is gonna be rocking. thx @kerrywright @abstratt http://bit.ly/1apVek #
• Looking forward to a shipment of my childhood lego from back home. 28kg ;-) Trains, cars, .. Lots and lots of fun with the boys coming up. #
• @abstratt thx.. intermittent problem at my hoster .. thats what you get for shared hosting.. time to move to a VPS? in reply to abstratt #
• Neil Gaimans @neilhimself downstairs library rocks. I wonder if he read it all. http://bit.ly/3V9Z5s #
• Just joined a twibe. Visit http://twibes.com/Sustainability to join #
• Just joined a twibe. Visit http://twibes.com/maven to join #
• @derJMR probier einfach beide.. in reply to derJMR #
• @derJMR ja sowohl #ubuntu als auch #opensuse gibt es ja als live cd .. reinschieben und los gehts. Persoenlich bin ich ein ubuntu convert in reply to derJMR #
• @derJMR und im gegensatz zum Mac kannst du ja gratis probiern ;-) in reply to derJMR #
• @lunafiko you will like magic and #android … in reply to lunafiko #
• Looking forward to more details about @abstratt s project around model driven prototyping after a private sneak peak. Very promising. #

First the symptoms:

It all started with sporadic and unreproducible disappearance of categories in the wordpress admin interface. For some reason it did not cause any obvious problems on the mosabuam site. The VIJUG site however had the categories disappear in the menu. This problem was not visible since we are not using categories on the main site, but e.g. the tagcloud links stopped working. In the end even the main page of recent posts stopped working and just showed an error message that there are no post for these criteria (not mentioning which these are..).

Looking at the database schema I found a bunch of inconsistencies that mostly acted as detractors from the the real problem. Fixing some of them up by deleting orphan records, giving descriptions to all categories and tags and such sometimes seemed to make things better, but now I have a feeling it might all have been sheer coincidence. Searching around on google and various other places did turn up similar problems, but all measures suggested did not help.

And then the source of the problem and the solution:

However fuzzing around with mysql via phpmyadmin I found that we got more and more error messages like

Error
SQL query: Edit
SHOW FULL FIELDS FROM `wp_terms` ;
MySQL said: Documentation
#1 - Can't create/write to file '/tmp/#sql_559_0.MYI' (Errcode: 28)

whenever I selected any table in any database in the structure view in phpmyadmin. It also appeared whenever I tried to edit a row in the browse section of phpmyadmin. After searching for a problem like that related to wordpress and mysql on the web I found this link and concluded that even though this talks about a much older version of wordpress (we are at the latest all the time.. currently 2.8.4) the problem might still be the same. And lo and behold it was. Getting my hosting provider to fix the problem with the access rights in /tmp resolved the issue. Fingers crossed it stays like that and a big #fail to WordPress for failing silently and MySQL for buggering up the first place.

• @tobrien Agreed. The Debian testing package is a bit more up to date. What I do though is http://tinyurl.com/lqp32g #maven #ubuntu #nexus in reply to tobrien #
• Downloaded Google Listen http://listen.googlelabs.com/index.html .. now off to go canoeing #
• Wow. John Willis from itmanagement is going to work on ubuntu one cloud. Look forward to the results. #
• @kellyrob99 Promise to look at joda-time tomorrow.. http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ #
• Enjoying the Victoria dragon boat races… #

The Mosabuam :)