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It’s the summer, and durring the summer heat servers tend to act more like unstable demons than they should.

My machine has been randomly rebooting, hard locking, and all around pain in the ass the past week or two.

Everytime it does this my mysql databases seem to get funky, and the easiest sign to this is when I view this blog.

Ultimate Tag Warrior tells me there is some kind of error in the wp_postmeta table.

The easy fix for this is to cruise over to my phpmyadmin on the server and run a simple repair table operation on all of my wordpress tables. note: you may or may not have all the same tables I do in my wordpress database.

REPAIR TABLE `wp_categories` , `wp_comments` , `wp_dl` , `wp_dlmap` , `wp_downloads` , `wp_falbum_cache` , `wp_kiwi` , `wp_linkcategories` , `wp_links` , `wp_openid_associations` , `wp_openid_assoc_handles` , `wp_openid_trust` , `wp_options` , `wp_post2cat` , `wp_post2tag` , `wp_postmeta` , `wp_posts` , `wp_tags` , `wp_tag_synonyms` , `wp_usermeta` , `wp_users` , `wp_xspf_player` , `wp_xspf_player_categories` , `wp_xspf_player_tracks_categories` ;

After running your query you have the choice to make this command a bookmark for easier access to it later. I think it’s a good idea to keep the query as I know I’ll likely have to run it a few more times before it cools off again.
Another issue with these broken tables is snort will not be able to log to it’s database too. It will try and report this to your syslog if running. Your errors may vary, but generally I’ve noticed anytime snort compains about database, then it just wants some love.

Aug 11 05:25:07 mywhiz snort[11349]: database: mysql_error: MySQL server has gone away SQL=INSERT INTO reference_system (ref_system_name) VALUES ('cve')
Aug 11 05:25:07 mywhiz snort[11349]: database: mysql_error: MySQL server has gone away
Aug 11 05:25:07 mywhiz snort[11349]: database: Unable to insert unknown reference tag ('2002-0012') used in rule.

Again going to phpmyadmin and selecting all of snorts tables and choosing the repair operation saves things.

REPAIR TABLE `acid_ag` , `acid_ag_alert` , `acid_event` , `acid_ip_cache` , `base_roles` , `base_users` , `data` , `detail` , `encoding` , `event` , `icmphdr` , `iphdr` , `opt` , `reference` , `reference_system` , `schema` , `sensor` , `signature` , `sig_class` , `sig_reference` , `tcphdr` , `udphdr`;