Hello,

I had bbpress installed and working very nicely – integrated with wordpress and working as a private forum for to allow guests to discuss our upcoming wedding. All was going well, but I’ve suddenly found that I can’t get into the forum or the administrator section because the installation error screen is coming up:

Oh dear!

bbPress is already installed.

Perhaps you meant to run the upgrade script instead?

I have had some weird issues recently which my hosting provider may or may not have “fixed” by rolling back to 6th July. So I have 2 questions:

1) Does anyone have any idea what might have caused this? I haven’t touched either the WP or bbpress installations at all. I assume nothing in bbpress would update automatically and break older versions of wordpress (I’m still on v2.9-ish). I realise this is a ludicrously weak bug report but I’m a bit lost right now and I can’t get into bbpress to check what plugins are active, which version I’m on etc…

2) If I do need to just cut my losses, wipe it clean and reinstall, is there a way to backup everyone’s comments and then repopulate the fresh bbpress with them?

Any help most appreciated,

Adam.

[@chrishajer Participant 14 years, 5 months ago]

I would not try and reinstall – just try to figure out what went wrong and fix it. It will result in less work in the end, and may help someone else depending on what you find.

bbPress will not update anything on its own. WordPress won’t either (although WordPress will tell you about available upgrades.)

I think you should explain the weird issues you had and how your host fixed them. Seems likely that that’s related. Either the host did something, or you did something. Nothing happens by itself.

You can always log in to your host with FTP and get a directory listing of running plugins in the my-plugins directory.

[@adammurphy Member 14 years, 5 months ago]

Yes that’s a good point – didn’t think of the FTP.

Plugins:

admin add user

allow images

bb-wysisyg editor

force login

hidden forums

wordpress integration

The problems I had on the main site:

My host are insisting that they didn’t touch it, and I certainly didn’t, so I’m not sure if it’s been hacked, or it’s some sort of database glitch or what. On the WP site, all of the categories were reset to “uncategorized” which, for a site running comicpress, which is category-based, was a bit of a disaster. Just as I was panicking, it seemed to find the categories again, and reset the site to 6th July (which I assumed was them rolling back altough they insist they haven’t). I also noticed the category order plugin giving the following error:

WordPress database error: [Can’t create/write to file

‘/tmp/#sql_e93_0.MYI’ (Errcode: 22)]

SHOW COLUMNS FROM wp_terms LIKE ‘term_order’

WordPress database error: [Duplicate column name ‘term_order’]

ALTER TABLE wp_terms ADD term_order INT( 4 ) NULL DEFAULT ‘0’

Again, if this suggests anything to you, or I can provide any more info, I’d be most grateful,

Adam.

[@chrishajer Participant 14 years, 5 months ago]

Can’t create/write to file ‘/tmp/#sql_e93_0.MYI’ (Errcode: 22)

That is a problem with MySQL. That is something your host needs to address. MySQL cannot write to that MYI file on the /tmp partition for some reason. This is something they need to resolve.

I’m afraid your problems are larger than bbPress. The trouble with bbPress and your earlier loss of categories and the plugin problem in WordPress are all symptoms of a larger problem and something your host needs to resolve.

Are you on a Windows host? I can’t find reference to it on Linux at all. It could be something as simple as out of space on the device, but it’s something for the host to resolve.

[@adammurphy Member 14 years, 5 months ago]

Hey Chris,

thanks for taking the time to look at this – I really appreciate it. I’ll take it up with my host. If it were the case (as I suspect), that whatever the problem is, the data is now corrupt and I’ll need to do a clean re-install, is there some way to extract the posts and repopulate bbpress?

[@chrishajer Participant 14 years, 5 months ago]

Depends on how damaged things are and how much was lost. Do you have any backups from before the problem occurred? If so, you can just restore to that earlier time, losing everything created after that point. Otherwise, it’s hard to say what might not have been written to MySQL.

There are binary logs for MySQL as well, where you can sometimes replay the SQL to recreate the things that failed, but it’s tedious.

[@kevinjohngallagher Member 14 years, 5 months ago]

Hi Adam,

Make sure you take a backup of your MySQL data at every oppertunity when talking to your host.

If you can get one from PHPmyAdmin great, if not ask your host for backups.

Don’t overwrite them, and rename them with the day/time and after which correspondance you got the backup.

When this is all sorted, load the .sql backup into a text editor (and you can sift through the code). Might not be pretty but you’ll at least see the extent of the issue.

If it’s gone south, and the host can’t help, you’re in for a long slog. That said, one of the positives here is that the bbPress table structure (while a bit… not optomized – bad english for bad table design) is easy to read and replace/backup. I’ve had to do it myself, and we can offer tips if it comes to it, but it’s not as bad as it sounds if you get some forum of backup/old DB.

[@adammurphy Member 14 years, 5 months ago]

Hi guys,

thanks so much for you help and advice on this. I’ve got the host to rollback the whole site to before the error occurred, and that seems to be working so I’m crossing my fingers it will be ok now (and doing nightly backups…)

I’ve repeatedly asked the host what caused the problem and they’ve not been answering – most recent response was “Sorry, but we can’t let you know what was caused the problem.” – which might mean they don’t know or else could mean they don’t want me to know… ho hum.

Anyways – thanks very much for taking to time to help with this, particularly as it’s not actually a bbpress issue at all.

Adam.