This morning I awoke to find that the forum was down. I got this error message:
phpBB : Critical Error
Error doing DB query userdata row fetch
DEBUG MODE
SQL Error : 1016 Can’t open file: ‘phpbb_sessions.MYI’. (errno: 145)
SELECT u.*, s.* FROM phpbb_sessions s, phpbb_users u WHERE s.session_id = ‘46665badf953590be370ecc7644ab342’ AND u.user_id = s.session_user_id
Line : 325
File : sessions.php
At first I suspected that MySQL was down. But the daemon was up. Then I went into phpMyAdmin and everything looked fine, except that I could not see the phpbb_sessions table. So I Googled around and it turns out that this is a common problem. Some threads about this problem are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. The thing is, nobody really seems to know what causes it! This is the first time I’ve ever experienced this since Jan 2004. It could be that the session table is full, though that doesn’t seem right. The forum doesn’t really get that much traffic. My guess is that the dark side of the force is attacking the site. 😉