If you search for Placid via Google, you’ll see that this site is now result 9 or 10 if you’re searching via their .com or .co.uk domains – my recent pledge to get my site noticed by Google and various other search engines is finally working out, and in all honesty it wasn’t that hard! I’ve noticed that MSN Search (MSN stands for Microsoft Search for Noobs, honest!) has finally indexed my site after I decided to let it view beplacid.com via robots.txt. Not that anyone uses MSN search, anyway.

On a previous post (title The Perils of MySQL), I stated how frustrated I was with MySQL at the time. My problems seem to have disappeared for the time being, with only one case of MySQL falling over since I previously posted about it (sod’s law!). One of the first steps to debugging the issue was to enable logging in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file by uncommenting (removing the hash at the start of the line) the following line:

#log		= /var/log/mysql/mysql.log

However, once I had done that I was not getting any issues whatsoever; coupled with a recent update to MySQL 5.0.32-3 from Debian and I don’t seem to have the issues anymore – which suggests it might be fixed by proxy, as it were. I’m not entirely convinced however.

During my initial investigations (at the time of my original post), I received an email from Sheeri of sheeri.com and technocation.org who suggesting a possible solution to my problem, you can read that email here (aspects of this email have been removed for privacy reasons). Essentially, her suggested fix is to check the data files located under /var/lib/mysql/ (or the path specified by innodb_data_home_dir in /etc/mysql/my.cnf) that begin with ibdata and check that their owner has read/write/execute (octal 7) permissions for those data files.

Although the solution didn’t work to me, i’d like to thank Sheeri for taking the time to respond to my blog, and I have decided to post it here for others that may find it useful!

On an unrelated matter, does anyone know what happened to Debian Etch being released in March?…