[Deploying Sakai] Database corruption (mysql and sakai)

[bruceballou at olk12.com]

Hello All,

We have been having some troubles with a sakai instance and the
databases.

We are running CentOS-5 as a virtual machine on VMWare ESXi 3.5, mysql
server version 5.0.77 Source distribution, sakai release 2.6.3.

First issue we had was something made the gateway page inaccessible, and
we got an error, when we refreshed, we got the relogin page and it let
us login and we were able to navigate around and everything else seemed
to work OK. We ended up building a new sakai server and database server
(2 separate systems) and re-entered the 500 plus users.

Second, a couple of weeks after, melete stopped working correctly, Admin
could login and create/upload documents, but when a teacher logs in, the
only options they see in modules are View and Preferences, which when
clicked on throws an error (I had posted this earlier). I replaced the
database with a clean one, and modules works correctly. This leads me to
believe that there is trouble in the database.

I checked the permissions in the !site.template.course and made sure
that the melete.author and melete.student were properly applied (as
Mallika Thoppay suggested) with no result. It appears that those
permissions are set to null (this error shows up in the catalina.out
file).

We have removed melete from the sakai instance, and removed the tables
in the database that relate to melete.  Now what I see is that modules
is not available (which was expected) but when I open one of the sites
that had modules in it, the modules option is still in the site although
when you click it the page is just blank.

I can not find information on the database relations of these pieces
(anatomy of sakai and mysql tables) and hope that someone can give me
direction on finding this so we can find the root cause. Is there some
place I can look to find out what might have corrupted the database? we
only had one person adding sites when this happened, so we are
dumbfounded.

Please let me know if more information is needed.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.



Bruce Ballou