☩ Walking in Light with Christ – Faith, Computing, Diary

I’m using vnstat to track my inbound and outbound traffic for quite some time on my FreeBSD powered router systemat home.
Until this very day it worked completely flawless, so almost every day I issued the command:

vnstat --days

To check the internal and external flow of traffic to my FreeBSD node. The advantages of using vnstat this ways are numerous,
maybe the most notable benefit is that you can keep an eye on the increase of traffic to your webserver,
that’s absolutely handy if you try to better rank your websites and increase monthly traffic to your Apache.
The above command will show up data for server accessbility since, vnstat started to build databases and if a drastic dropdown in network traffic to your system is observed this would be an indicator for some kind of problem with either your networkor some of the network services your server provides.

Well as I said today I tried to once again examine the yesterday statistics of vnstat, but instead the statistics the following error appeared:

pcfreak# vnstat -u
Error: Database load failed even when using backup. Aborting.

A quick research in Google led me to some other complains of the error and some explanation that the error is caused of some vnstat database flaw which is encountered on 32 bit and 64 bit architectures.

In order to solve the problem I had to:
1. Remove the old vnstat databases, using command:

pcfreak# rm -rf /var/db/vnstat

2. Rebuild vnstat database for my network interface

pcfreak# vnstat -u -i em0
Error: Unable to read database "/var/db/vnstat/em0".
Info: -> A new database has been created.
And we’re done, vnstat should start working as expected once again.

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Tags: Resolving vnstat "Error: Database load failed even when using backup. Aborting." on FreeBSD

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 5:26 pm and is filed under FreeBSD, System Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.