Mt 2.63 Suddenly Stopped Working, mt-comments.cgi running wild / Can't log in / "Invalid entry Options

[Songdog]

I'm trying to help Languagehat get his site back online. He was working on cleaning up comment spam (using MT Blacklist) and one minute everything was fine, the next the site was blowing up. The first sign was this:

CODE

An error occurred: Could not save your blacklist data: Can't find
file: './language_mtdb/mt_plugindata.frm' (errno: 13)

Then he got a report from a user that tried to post a comment that

CODE

Rebuild failed: Renaming tempfile
'/home/language/public_html/recent_comments.mt_include.new' failed:
Renaming '/home/language/public_html/recent_comments.mt_include.new'
to '/home/language/public_html/recent_comments.mt_include' failed: No
such file or directory

Finally we discovered that it was no longer possible to log in to mt.cgi.

It turns out that mt-comments.cgi was suddenly grabbing over 50% of the CPU, and the ISP disabled it (via chmod and chown). They've re-enabled it since at our request, but we still can't log in, and therefore can't even do a proper export or try re-building the site. When anyone clicks on a link to mt-comments.cgi or tries to post a comment via a full post archive page they get this:

CODE

An error occurred:

Invalid entry ID '2413'

The entry ID, of course, depends on the post.

I'm guessing that the BerkeleyDB got FUBARed somehow, but I have no idea how to go about fixing it, or whether it's even possible. Several people have posted in these forums about "Invalid entry ID" error messages but I haven't found any suggest solution that might apply for us.

I'm steeling myself for processing the current static site into MT export format, doing a complete fresh install (probably of MT 3) and starting from scratch. But I'd really really prefer to just get the site back online.

Can anyone offer any ideas?

-Songdog