Outage today

[russellw]

Good afternoon all.

Apologies for the outage today.

It appears that for some unknown reason the database spontaneously restarted itself at 14:30 today but in doing so it corrupted some critical tables that meant the 'forum' software was unable to connect to the database with the authorised 'user' so at least the 'permissions' table was corrupted.

I thought I'd get away with a database table repair as I've done in the past but that then rendered mySQL unable to restart.

With some help from our ISP engineers we got mySQL restarted in a sort of safe mode and I've done another repair without breaking it this time so it is back up and running.

There will be a couple more database restarts required to fix some remaining issues but I'll perform those after midnight.