The server was continuing to do weird things so I did some more research. The mysqld service was randomly crashing because of an out of memory error, even though the damned server has 2GB of RAM and plenty to spare when the crash occurred. Hunted around a bit and found that some other people (like 2) were having a similar issue, and it was seemingly related to a failed swap partition. Looked at my config and sure enough: swap was not loading. Something to do with the GUID of the partition changing and fstab not changing to match it. That’s been fixed and swap is loading now.

After all that, I found out that mysqld was not initializing properly on boot. I have no idea why, because the fu–ing syslog says it’s starting and there are no errors anywhere, but mysql status says its not running. Created a startup script and popped it where it’s supposed to go and now it loads. Again, still nothing in the log to show my new script is running. This page was a great deal of help in creating the startup script.

Lets see what else this stupid server has in store for me.