I don’t know what happened, but my Ubuntu Linux server crashed hard the other night. And when I brought it back, the rest of the network couldn’t see it. I could ping my gateway (router), and the server was pulling an IP address over DHCP, and the rest of the world had connectivity to it, but I couldn’t ping anything else on the network. And my Windows machines couldn’t connect to it.
I tried changing network cables and changing ports because that helped once in the past, but not this time. Finally, I found a command.
mii-tool -r
And that worked! The command forces the network card to renegotiate duplex. Suddenly I could ping, and I could connect.
Then I found I had a database corruption issue with WordPress. Scary. But since the screen indicated MySQL had been what died hard, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
WordPress stores its MySQL database name and password in wp-config.php. I copied down that password (mine was obnoxious) and entered the following from from my SSH connection:
mysqlcheck -h localhost -u wordpress -p --repair --extended wordpress
It prompted me to enter the password. Copy and paste saves the day.
It took a little while, but fixed all the issues, and brought the site back to life.