Thread

Hello

ExpressionEngine 1.6.7 Build:  20090122

Our site just went down http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/

Our sysadmin says we’re getting this error:

ERROR 1129 (00000): Host ‘www7-j….’ is blocked because
of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’

Our users are seeing this:

Database Error: Unable to connect to your database. Your database appears to be turned off or the database connection settings in your config file are not correct. Please contact your hosting provider if the problem persists.

Please advise what we need to do to resolve this. Thanks in advance

Has it been working before, ie this is a sudden error? Check your config.php and make sure that your username, password etc are still in there, and correct.

Site appears to be working fine for me, by the way? Did you resolve that already?

Thanks for the quick response - yes it was all working perfectly before and has been for last couple of months. It’s now better than it was when I first emailed, but users are still getting this error message intermittently:

Database Error: Unable to connect to your database. Your database appears to be turned off or the database connection settings in your config file are not correct. Please contact your hosting provider if the problem persists.

Hitting refresh clears it, but then it reappears: if you click the main ‘Advice’ link from homepage you may get the message, refresh and it goes away, then click ‘Advice’ again and the message reappears

This was the message our sysadmin gets:
ERROR 1129 (00000): Host ‘www7-j…....’ is blocked because
of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’

So if it’s a ‘too many connections’ error where in the settings could we alter things?

Further infor from sysadmin:

“taking another look at the message it says that its “connection errors”.
So rather than there being too many concurrent connections there are
actually errors occurring. I don’t see any in the apache or mysql logs
though.

I’ve increased the number of allowed errors before the host block occurs
which will hopefully reduce the number of times you get the error. BUT
this is not a fix you must still get EE support to take a look.”

Thanks

I just clicked around your site for a bit, and it’s working as it should; I am not seeing any error messages whatsoever. Which means that in all probability we are not seeing a configuration issue here. Rather, it looks like a reliability issue with your database, meaning that it sometimes does not respond to EE’s queries.

Please contact your host and ask them about it, they really are the only ones in a position to tell you what’s going on.

I’ve increased the number of allowed errors before the host block occurs which will hopefully reduce the number of times you get the error. BUT this is not a fix you must still get EE support to take a look.”

As I’ve said, I don’t see any errors. If there are errors with the database server, we would have to know what they are in order to begin troubleshooting the issue. The server logs should be able to tell your admin.

Since this worked fine until recently, did you change anything? Upgraded EE, perhaps? Or did something on the server change? New version of PHP or MySQL, anything like that?

Hi

This was the original error:
ERROR 1129 (00000): Host ‘www…’ is blocked because
of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’

We don’t think it’s database reliability as we have had no reported
or logged issues and the performance graphs are all low. We’ve added some
more checks and higher level of logging to the mysql server but still had no errors. Please can you tell us how we could get more info logged to apache or elsewhere to help us debug it?

The only thing that was installed yesterday was a replacement of
libgd2-xpm and php5-gd (optional imaging server requirements) but don’t see how this could
affect the amount of database connection errors

If there are any other settings in the CP’s System Administration, Utilities or System Preferences areas you could point us at that would be really helpful

Many thanks

berkeley, are you using any extensions on this site? If so, can you temporarily disable them by clicking on the big green button labeled Disable Extensions to see if that makes a difference.

The problem is there WAS a host block because of ‘connection errors’ but we temporarily fixed this by increasing the the number of allowed errors before the host block occurs. Since then the site has been fine, but it’s just a temporary fix and we’d like to resolve the connection errors problem - this is tricky without any errors logged - is there a way of getting EE to log more information?

berkeley, are there any other errors occuring other than what you mentioned at first?

What about your connections? Are the set to persistent?

Have you seen this wiki entry, especially the final paragraph about persistent versus non-persistent connections?

EEWiki:// Reduce Queries

Hi Sue

Thanks for your reply - sorry for delay in replying, we’re on UK time.

No other errors are far as I’m aware, and database connections are set to Non-persistent.

Thanks for the link to the Reduce Queries wiki we will look into some of these options and get back to you if we still have problems.

I’d still be pressing your host for details: As you said, there was a block because of ‘connection errors’, but when asked about them, they couldn’t tell you exactly what they were, but “increased the number of allowed errors”? To clarify: your host is disabling your database, for all intents and purposes. They should at least be able to tell you why and on what grounds. At this point I don’t think the error lies with EE, but I’d really like to get to the bottom of this.

is there a way of getting EE to log more information?

Well, no: EE acts a the client here, trying to connect to the (database) server. If there is an error in establishing this connection, it’s the server that will log it.