Just to fill you in the current status at boards.ie: sometime on Monday we started having problems with our vBulletin database (currently over 2 GB in size) where the server process kept dying. After a few attempts to restart this, ecksor ran a repair and managed to get things running on Monday night. This was okay until Tuesday afternoon when the database returned to its bad behaviour. Again, regi tried a database repair, which didn’t solve the problem. He then started an advanced database repair which took ages (due to the huge size of the database). regi and ecksor identified a potential SQL problem with a vBulletin modification we installed for RSS feeds.

This has been a bad week for boards.ie; it was just at the end of last week that we had to replace our web server hardware after it “fell over”. However, if this article from Slashdot is to believed (Monday, January 24th to be Worst Day of the Year), then things were meant to go wrong on Monday!