Capricious machines

May 24, 2004

I just about now managed to log on. My laptop, that contains all the important files, first got hit by the sasser worm, and then by the amrit virus :-). The amrit virus thought that he was smart as he had been restoring endangered operating systems for years now.

Whenever I restore the operating system, I rename and store the old, working copy of the system so that I can revert back in case there is a problem. This time I was so confident (to be frank, in a hurry) that I didn’t feel the need to preserve the previous installation. Something that has never happened happened.

MySQL refused to work.
My CD-drive refused to burn CDs
My network card refused to connect to the PC

The most baffling was the MySQL thing. I can’t even remember how many times I have installed the MySQL server on my computer. In the past three years, it has always taken me five minutes to get MySQL running on the new installation. Not this time.

Since I had upgraded from Windows XP Personal to Windows XP Professional (apart from the fact that MySQL perfectly works on my PC that has Windows XP Professional, that I rarely use these days), I thought there was some problem with the operating system. I reinstalled it multiple times as well as did extensive research on why MySQL was not working. The Internet was no help. Eventually I decided to bring back Windows XP Personal, but it was on a CD that came with the laptop. The stupid system-restore CD formats all the drives and then copies the original software.

So for two consecutive days I kept trying to somehow take the backup (all current files are on my laptop). The CD was not working so couldn’t take backups on CDs. The network card was not working so couldn’t connect to my PC and save the files over there. Finally Alka suggested that since anyway I was having to spend so much time trying to figure out what to do and what not to do, why didn’t I made small zip files of all the necessary files and uploaded them to my yahoo briefcase? Actually I had taken full backups this year on the 3rd of March so all the data up to that date was saved on CDs. I must have saved a few big programs but they can be downloaded again. And graphics work anyway I do on the PC. So all I needed to do was, save my address book, the current email messages in text format, the PHP code that I have recently written for a few of my clients, a few MySQL databases (again in text format), a few Word documents, zip them all and save them in the yahoo briefcase.

I did that and then very grudgingly, inserted the restore CD and let it format the partitions and restore to the factory-installed software. Contrary to what I had thought, when I again installed MySQL, I didn’t work.

Because of the sasser and lovesan worms, I had decided to get the patches from the Microsoft website. So we thought may be it was because of those patches that MySQL was refusing to work. Again I got the system restored sans the patches and tested MySQL and again it didn’t work. The past three days had totally worn me out and I was feeling totally disgusted with me and the state of the affairs.

I was testing the MySQL log files when Alka again came to my rescue. She was in the other room watching a movie when she noticed how distraught I was. She switched off the TV and sat by me. While I was going over the error log file, she pointed to a line that said a certain file, my.cnf, couldn’t be located. Since I have never had to create or modify that file, I brushed her suggestion aside and continued reading the other things. Then absentmindedly I opened a blank file in the Notepad, wrote a few MySQL configuration commands, and saved the file as “my.cnf” in the root directory. When I tested, MySQL worked!

Now, I have never, ever created this file to make MySQL work. Tens of times I have clean-installed the operating system and installed MySQL and it has always seamlessly worked with PHP and Apache. Why this time it needed my.cnf and why it never needed it before, I have no idea, but I’ll find out in the coming days.

I have used computers for nine years now (I had my first computer in April 1995) and it has never happened before that I had to lose some data. I’m feeling kind of betrayed by my machines but then, things are not always behaving the way we want them to behave.

Sorry for the long rant but it’s a bliss to be able to use my computer after three days of drudgery :-).