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.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.