flush-hosts ???

ercatli

My small Vanilla forum has been dormant for a while, while I have been updating other parts of the site. But recently a few people visited while I was on holidays (Google Analytics told me) and when I went to log in, I couldn't. Instead I got this message.

A fatal, non-recoverable error has occurred

Technical information (for support personel):

Error Message
The connection to the database failed:
Affected Elements
MySQL.OpenConnection();
The error occurred on or near: Host 'oh' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'
For additional support documentation, visit the Lussumo Documentation website at: lussumo.com/docs

I searched the documentation and this forum for "flush-hosts", but found nothing. I guess I have three questions please:

1. Is this error message telling me that I should use a program like phpMyAdmin and a function called "flush-hosts"?

2. What does that actually mean please?

3. Does this suggest someone has, deliberately or otherwise, stuffed my forum by doing something to it?

Thanks for help.

Minisweeper

I'd say the best thing to do in this instance would be to contact your host for advice. They can certainly sort the problem out and maybe help identify why it popped up in the first place.

ercatli

Thanks for advice. Strange thing happened. After trying about a dozen times over a few hours to get into the forum, and getting that error message, sabout 6 hours later things were OK again. So it must have been the host having problems, as you inferred. But I'm still a bit curious about what it all meant, and, if it was a host problem, whether the error message was any help. But it's only academic now, thanks. : )