Ugly Hole Somewhere

It’s been an interesting weekend, watching my inept hosting provider attempt to upgrade the virtualization software that runs my VPS host. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

At some point, my inept provider crashed my database & caused wp_options to be in need of a repair. Before I could get there and do that though, owing to sleep requirements, more than one user was presented with the standard WordPress Installation Screen, the one you see the first time you set up a new site by going here:
http://example.com/wp-admin/install.php

I don’t know if that’s a bug or not, or just a weird artifact from a fubared database, but I also learned that this happened when a user went through the install process:

Your new WordPress blog has been successfully set up at:

http://example.com

You can log in to the administrator account with the following information:

Username: admin
Password: User already exists.  Password inherited.

Actually, that happened multiple times before I could repair the options table in the database, so I had some Hello World! posts & comments to delete.

It didn’t eff up the database any worse than it already was, and the password wasn’t compromised that I can tell. But it still seems like an odd thing to have happen, so I wanted to throw it out there for someone smarter than me to know about.

And beware your own inept hosting provider. Mine was good enough to inform me a whopping 24 hours before their clown-car circus act, so I had a DB & theme backup.