Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance

Joel, it seemed to come back to normal.

I really need to mention something very important, and that is that the flailing and hacking I do is on my own personal hobby/blogging websites and they are not on business critical production websites. So, I can afford to tangle things up without having a CEO and four VP’s looking over my shoulder ?? If I were working with a business critical production site, I would be many times more cautious making sure change control policies and procedures were established and followed.

I don’t want to lead someone down a dangerous path by telling them how I hacked my way to something that worked for me. But, what I did seemed to bring me to a good, quick solution for my needs.

Dan

Do you have a copy of your old wp-config.php file?
If so, you should be able to find what your database settings were from that. When people have the web server and the mysql database on the same machine, they often set the server to “localhost” and even limit access to the database to localhost to keep people from hacking the database from outside.

I hope this helps and doesn’t hurt…I don’t know why an automatic upgrade should clobber your wp-config.php file though. If you copied in a new one, I think it loads in as wp-config-sample.php and doesn’t normally overwrite your wp-config.php file.

If you did overwrite everything, you may end up back into a fresh install I think, and the system may ask you for all the database information as though it were going to do a new installation from scratch.

Do you have backups where you can just quickly start from scratch and attempt the upgrade from the beginning again? Sorry, I hope I’m helping and not hurting…

Joel,

I wonder if Step 1 of the Manual Update might have thrown you off when it said that if you copy the upgrade files into your installation that wp-config.php won’t be overwritten.

If somehow you removed the wp-config.php file, that would wipe out the file that tells wordpress how to log into your database.

Do you have an old copy of your wp-config.php file? If not, are you able to log into your database, say, using phpmyadmin via the web or mysql from the command line? Do you have backups?

Dan

By the way, if you try to create the file by hand, usually if your web server and database server are on the same machine, your server name may very likely be “localhost”, and many people limit database access to connections from local processes to keep hackers from hacking in from the outside.

One thing I experienced many times with automatic upgrades is that if there is anything in the wp-content/upgrade directory, the upgrade will delay for a long time and then give an error. I also noticed that automatic upgrades of the whole wordpress version will often leave behind a file that won’t get deleted when the upgrade is done. I also noticed that some plugins like gd press tools seems to leave behind upgrade files when it is finished upgrading. I found deleting them allows other upgrades to go through fast and successfully.

However, I’m having a little trouble with one of my normal wordpress upgrades under C-panel again. It seems upgraded but it keeps telling me the upgrade failed and that I need to retry. Retrying leaves a failure message. Yet it says I’m already upgraded to the latest version.

I hope your problem getting database connectivity was easily resolved for you.

One of my regular wordpress upgrades is being a bit of a pain in the butt at this time. upgrade.php said it was already updated and update-core.php gave the old “Briefly unavailable…” message. I may have to do the manual installation myself ??

This is weird. After getting the “Briefly…” message in wp-admin and the upgrade/update programs, I just pulled up the website at
https://save-your-marriage.org this time (sounds the same as the earlier one, but it’s different.

What happened is the site came up looking normal, and then when I went back to the wp-admin page, it seemed to work. I think I’m in the twilight zone…

Do the manual, dandick. Some servers are having memory issues, and I would not be shocked to learn this is causing weird uploads.

I did the manual update and got the “Briefly…” maintenance message again and running wp-admin seemed to get that “Briefly…” message.

I renamed my .maintenance file to .maintennceold visited
https://save-your-marriage.org/wp-admin and I got my dashboard with no error messages. Automatic theme updates was a great idea. I still find updating atahualpa seems to take a long time and failed. Probably another C-panel vs. Apache permissions thing.

I’m way too chatty. I’d better catch up with my wife and hit the sack.

Ipstenu, thanks. Yes, I actually did overlook setting php_value memory_limit to 64M in my .htaccess files.

Part of the problem with the glitches in, say, upgrading the themes was that I did not empty them out and reinstall from within WordPress 3.0. Perhaps that would be a good idea. It’s a little bit of a pain, but not much as I don’t generally keep around many themes I don’t use, and I don’t generally use many themes as it is a bit of a security pain to track them all.

But, what I seem to run into with the theme updates is that it may be running into a permission problem (or it could have hit a memory shortfall and died without an error message). But, when it failed, it sometimes left a .maintenance file in the root directory of my website, causing me to get the “Briefly…” message once again.

I’m starting to wish I could copy the things I found along the way, summarize it, and replace all my responses with one concise summary that would be able to benefit others who may run into this problem. Sorry for all the hyper-verbosity.

I’ve tried everything:

1) Backing up my databases and whole site
2) Uploading the files of WP3 and overwriting over old files
3) Didn’t work, so I reversed everything, copying the old files again over the new files… and didn’t work.
4) Starting from CERO, installing a fresh copy of WP in anohter directory and is not working (tried using the old database and a new one, but din’t work)!

Error establishing a database connection
This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can’t contact the database server at localhost. This could mean your host’s database server is down.

Are you sure you have the correct username and password?
Are you sure that you have typed the correct hostname?
Are you sure that the database server is running?

I’m willing to pay a reasonable fee to someone who can help me with this issue.

Why the upgrade of WP3 is causing too much troubles to too many people? I’ve read several complaints (“requests of help”) like mine. I’ve been using WP for a long time and in several web sites, and I never had this kind of problems. The automatic upgrade always worked flawlessly.

I think that I’ve lost all my web site!

The problem was solved by a friend. Thank you very much for all your help!

Joel, thanks for the good news. Did you get an idea from your friend what the root of the problem finally was?

Here’s a concise run-down of my experiences with some of my WordPress 3.0 installations (not WordPress-mu) under C-panel in case it might be of use to anyone.

Dan
————————————–
Backups, of course
I disabled my plugins
I deleted any leftover junk in wp-content/upgrade
I ran automatic update to WordPress 3.0. (may take several minutes)
Sometimes it would hang and then give the “Briefly unavailable”
I would remove the .maintenance file from the website’s
root directory.
I would do the upgrade manually.
I would run https://mysite.com/wp-admin
If it worked, great. If not, I’d try to see if I failed
to follow the instructions somehow and correct.
Most of the time, it finished with success.

After the core upgrade, there may be plugins or themes to update.
Again, I delete any leftover junk in wp-content/upgrade, and for me,
the core upgrade has always left behind some stuff there.
About 25% of the time, I found my automatic theme updates worked.
The rest of the time, I found they failed, so I would delete and
reinstall.
Upon doing any automatic update, I found a failure of any kind could
leave behind a .maintenance file which i would remove,
and then sometimes I would just do a shift-refresh to redo the
update or try to bring up the desired page again without losing
the data along the way.

Once the plugins and themes are updated, I would attempt to
turn the plugins back on.
I would also clear the cache for DB Cache, Super Cache, or on my
VPS without C-panel, I would clear the W3 Cache and turn it back on.
I would then go to phpmyadmin and optimize any tables with overhead
and analyze all the tables again.

I might then go back and pre-populate the caches and log out just to see if everything runs fast and looks good.

Does this sound like a healthy and effective approach?

This happened to me, site was down for 5-10 minutes, but than it started to work ok again. Now I am left with a stupid message:

Your auto upgrade didnt finished, please try again.

But the site is updated to 3.0 it must be a bug.