When you work with the great folks I do every day it comes as little surprise that when the stuff hits the fan and some site is in need of help there will be a legion of folks who jump into round-the-clock action to get things in a better place. While this could be a whole blog post about that alone it's not about that. Rather it's about one of those nagging little problems we came across while working on a site this Thanksgiving "holiday".
The problem is one that many have seen at one point or another:
[26-Nov-2011 22:35:17] PHP Notice: unserialize() [<a href='function.unserialize'>function.unserialize</a>]: Error at offset 200 of 1100 bytes in /var/www/mysite/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 1104
In fact this problem pops up enough that it has its own page in the Drupal Handbook. The problem is pretty straightforward to understand. Some object was serialized for storage in the database and has become corrupted.
Finding the source of the problem, however, can be challenging. The Handbook page has several examples and more in the comments of some quick hacks that can be done to bootstrap.inc or can be employed with their own database connections to test these serialized values. There are times when neither hacking bootstrap.inc nor connecting to the db directly are practical. Indeed for many using Drush is a good way around both of these. I spent a couple minutes looking and didn't find any scripts out there yet so I cobbled together a quick Drush command to help out here.
Although I use it all the time it turns I haven't written here about Adjix. There is 