I've had really bad experiences with VirtualBox and data loss in the past. So I was really uneasy about using Quickstart with VirtualBox. I tried to convert it to a VMWare image with no luck. So finally I just took a fresh QS ova and started using it with a fresh VirtualBox 4.0.4 (hadn't used it since v.3.)
I spent all day yesterday getting setup, installing AFP, configuring Durpal, setting up SVN. I left the VM running all night and until now. I came back to it an hour ago and was immediately getting mysql errors.
The first error I got was on the site:
PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away: SELECT expire, value FROM {semaphore} WHERE name = :name; Array ( [:name] => variable_init ) in lock_may_be_available() (line 165 of /home/quickstart/websites/lanfest.dev/trunk/includes/lock.inc).
If I reload I also get:
PDOException: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (111) in lock_may_be_available() (line 165 of /home/quickstart/websites/lanfest.dev/trunk/includes/lock.inc).
I tried to restart mysql but it wouldn't restart - telling me there was a segmentation fault. So I tried to restart the guest OS and that failed. It couldn't find an init, so it wont boot.
I took snapshots as I worked, so I restored from a previously good one. I tried to login to mysql via phpmyadmin and get mixed results (I've done this multiple times.) Once it showed there wasn't any databases, then I got kicked back to the login screen and it wont let me log back in. No error, just wont let me login.
So I restored again. I immediately went to phpmyadmin. It showed the DB but had another error on the screen. Then after a few seconds I was kicked out again, and not able to login. Hmm, well I typed all this out, hit reload and now I'm logged in and the databases are all there. However, Drupal is still giving me the same errors.
I have backups of the files I made custom changes to (themes) but don't have a backup of the entire VM and all it's configurations. It took me ~10hrs to get to this point. Will probably take me 4hrs to get back to where I was.
Is this sort of instability common with Quickstart? Any tips on keeping it running smoothly?
I'm running QS091, Drupal 7, VirtualBox 4.0.4 on Mac OS X 10.6.5.