Painful Lesson on Legacy Software

My mom is in the middle of a (potentially painful) lesson on legacy software. Namely, don’t use it. She has… *ahem* had all of her addresses in an ancient copy of Parsons Technology Addressbook 7.0. I forget exactly how many years ago Bob Parsons sold to Broderbund and they killed the product off, but it’s been a while. Complicating matters, the software appears to use a proprietary format MS Jet database to store the info in, and I’m having trouble (read “okay, what possible formats could an ABA file be?”) opening the stupid thing with anything but a text editor. Continue reading “Painful Lesson on Legacy Software”

Be Thankful

Wow, oh wow what a trip the last day has been.
So, I had dinner plans last night, and they were immediately complicated by the fact that I locked myself out of my office. No cell phone, but fortunately I had my wallet with me, so I could still get food, which is good, because I had been told about this place and the ranting and raving alone were enough to make me drool. It would have been a real letdown if I couldn’t buy dinner. Continue reading “Be Thankful”

RT 3.8.0 – Stable Again Thanks To InnoDB

Thanks to a couple of helpful folks on the rt-users mailing list, we were able to track down the cause of our problems. We experienced some corruption in our MySQL databases. I found out that you should “never” run RT on MyISAM tables and always use InnoDB. Oddly enough, we’ve run on MyISAM for years and never had this problem. However, we did have issues with slownes, for years, and it’s something we’ve been struggling with constantly.
for t in $(mysql -unotreal -pdontbother --batch --column-names=false -e "show tables" rt3);
do
mysql -e "alter table $t type=InnoDB" rt3;
done

Running this script revealed an error with the “Tickets” table.?Fortunately, the data itself in our tables was not corrupt, just the indexes were. ?myisamchk was able to repair these and allow us to convert all tables to InnoDB format. Once I fixed that error, I was able to convert everything over to InnoDB.
I was thrilled to see that, once the conversion was finished, RT popped right back up into place, with all of the tickets in their usual spots. And, as a bonus, the thing’s a lot faster than it ever was before.
Lesson learned. Next time, read the instructions more carefully.