My wife calls me while I was in my man cave tonight and tells me our mythbox has crashed and didn’t come back up with a reboot. I have a look and the thing it is asking me for the DB details (ie, location, password etc) – as if we are setting the mythtv installation again from scratch. This understandably throws me into a bit of a panic especially when she tells me she has already seen the screens and just entered through them!
I wasn’t able to log into the mysql tables using the cli client. Manually starting the mysql db FAILED as did restarting it or even stopping it, they all FAILED.
After digging in Google I noticed that the mysql.sock file that is created in /var/lib/mysql and which the mysql client must use to connect to the mysql db server was appearing and then the next moment it was gone, very very strange.
I looked at the size of the mysql.log file, it was over 3 GB! Looking in the mysql.log I see “Can’t start server: can’t create PID file: No space left on device” then the penny drops, I had run out of disk space on the root partition.
Deleting the 3GB mysql.log file gives me back 34% of /, rebooted and then off I go.
So the moral of the story kiddies is to check your log files for a hint to what’s going on and make sure you have enough space left in / or mysql will bomb out,