There’s a saying my Dad - a long time professional mechanic - always has said. “The Mechanic’s Car is always broken.” Not literally, of course… that’d be stupid. But what Pops meant by that is there’s always SOMETHING suboptimal about the car owned by a mechanic. Something that he knows isn’t critical to its operation, but something he knows is going to take him a while to fix… ONE DAY. But since it’s more a nuisance than anything, he figures his time’s better spent working on the important things – like fixing customer’s cars and making money. Meanwhile, that little thing persists… not looked at… not fixed… just… existing. Until, that is, it becomes a big enough issue where it IS a problem.

Which is why I am messing around with a MySQL database at midnight. My own personal mailserver’s got multiple components (MySQL, LDAP, Java, Postfix), and it’s kinda been out-of-sight, out-of-mind for a while. Tonight, one of the MySQL databases decided to shit itself. Of course, it’s the database that contains MY mailbox.

And yes, I have backups, and I can get it restored from that. But this SHOULD be repairable. And dammit, I heard the engine knock of this MySQL DB and chose to ignore it, thinking it’d go a little while longer before I needed to take the time to fix it. Anyone got any shortcuts to fixing an InnoDB database that won’t do a clean mysqldump with data recovery enabled?