EQEmulator Forums - Lost All Characters

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Lost All Characters

Can someone please help me...

I have been running a home EQ Server for over a year now with out to many problems.

But today when I log in there are no characters on any of my accounts on the login screen. I can see there in the character_ database but they dont show at login.

I get this error if anyone can please help at all I would be grateful.

Got a bogus character (Aramid) Ignoring!!!
PP length =19569 but PP should be 19568
Got a bogus character (Kofac) Ignoring!!!
PP length =19570 but PP should be 19568
Got a bogus character (Ricin) Ignoring!!!
PP length =19569 but PP should be 19568

Did you change anything ? Anything at all ?

I've never heard of PPs becoming corrupt like that, other than bad source code changes, or manually editing the character_ table in the DB, but that normally ends up with a zero length PP, not one that is one or two bytes out.

Assuming you have no backup of your database, back it up now:

Code:

mysqldump -u root -p <yourdbname> > mybackup.sql

Now, there is a chance you may be able to recover, if your have good entries in your character_backup table.

Execute this query:

Code:

select id, name, length(profile) from character_backup;

If you have entries with a length(profile) of 19568, then they are not corrupt, e.g.

Code:

mysql> select id, name, length(profile), ts from character_backup where name like 'Derision';

+------+----------+-----------------+---------------------+

| id   | name     | length(profile) | ts                  |

+------+----------+-----------------+---------------------+

|  209 | Derision |           19568 | 2008-05-23 20:59:46 |

|  210 | Derision |           19568 | 2008-05-23 21:05:06 |

|  227 | Derision |           19568 | 2008-05-29 18:37:47 |

|  226 | Derision |           19568 | 2008-05-29 18:32:46 |

|  334 | Derision |           19568 | 2008-06-29 16:41:51 |

|  335 | Derision |           19568 | 2008-06-29 18:32:23 |

| 4223 | Derision |           19568 | 2010-02-03 21:26:36 |

| 4221 | Derision |           19568 | 2010-02-03 20:18:43 |

+------+----------+-----------------+---------------------+

8 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Code:

#charbackup restore <CharName> <Backup ID>

Where <Backup ID> is the latest ID number from the query I listed above, where the length(profile) is the correct size of 19568.

I have never used the #charbackup restore command before, but I just deliberately NULLed out the profile of a character and tried to restore it in this manner, and it seemed to work, however whatever caused you character_ entries to become corrupted, may well have also corrupted the character_backup table as well, in which case you are out of luck if you have no database backup prior to the problem occurring.

Thank you VERY much for your help Derision. That worked perfectly luckily my character_backup table was intact. I ended up restoring about 20 characters with it :)

As for how it happened. I am not sure. I do keep backups but perhaps I need to re-look at how I do that. I do my backups with a programme called Auto Backup For MySQL. Which normally seems to work. As it allows me to back up daily automatically.

I did try to restore the Character_ table from an older backup. But it was still corrupt.

More than probably my fault. I must have messed something up today. When backing up.

Once again thank you very much for the fast response and for the solution it worked flawless. :)

One thing this has gotten my attention now. I need to look at a better way to backup the data.

Also, I found that this happened to me because the blob slot was losing data when I was backing up my data. This was fixed by saving blobs as HEX, as in:

prompt> mysqldump -uuser -ppassword -R --hex-blob=TRUE peq > backup.sql

hope this helps someone so they don't blow a day on it like I did