this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2022
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Lemmy Support

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Support / questions about Lemmy.

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Hello, I spun up my instance and when I was doing the initial setup I got an error "Server already exists". I reloaded the page and realized that the server was a copy of https://exploding-heads.com/. I was really confused since I didn't do anything. I didn't even federated with that instance. After that I changed the settings to how I wanted them to be and moved on with the day. I thought it was one time issue.

Few days later I restarted the server and when I got back to it the name, logo, description and sidebar have changed back to the ones from the other instance. I changed them back to normal and decided to restart just the docker containers. Again the same issue.

Normally the logs help but this time nothing out of normal shows up.

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[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (10 children)

We had a bug like this in a previous Lemmy version, but that was fixed. The thing is that name, description etc for the local instance and for federated instances are all stored in the same db table. To read info about the local instance, Lemmy reads the row in site db table with lowest id.

So it would be helpful if you could post the content of that table, something like select id, name from site order by id.

[–] Owner_of_donky@donky.social 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hmm, this is really strange. I decided to try to restart both the containers and the server several times. everything seems to be working now. Also I don't know how to access the table.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

sudo docker-compose exec postgres psql -U lemmy

Anyway its strange that a restart would make any difference. When we had this problem, the site name etc changed with every page reload (as it was reading a random row from the db table each time).

[–] Owner_of_donky@donky.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

After this command what do I do?

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Run the sql query from above: select id, name from site order by id

[–] Owner_of_donky@donky.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I ran it already. Nothing happens

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ah you need to add a ; at the end.

[–] Owner_of_donky@donky.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Looks normal then, cant think of anything that would cause your problem. I guess when it happens again, you can run the same sql query, and check that your instance name still has id 1. But it would be very strange if that changed somehow.

[–] Owner_of_donky@donky.social 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Ok, thank you really much! I will report if something goes wrong again.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago

No problem. This PR would fix the problem once it gets implemented.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2365

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