First I killed one server (domU) by having log_bin turned on (and cluttering the disk drive with several GiB of logs), although I do not need replication. Then I ran out of memory with mysqld on the server on which this blog is, so the blog would complain about the lack of communication with the DB. And rightly so. Now I found the magic bullet. I uncommented the line:
skip-bdb
… and now mysqld behaves again. What the heck do I know, why this is enabled by default. Same for the log_bin one on Debian (Etch) as well. Once you comment out the line with log_bin, don’t forget to comment out expire_logs_days, max_binlog_size, binlog_do_db, binlog_ignore_db. Oh, and by no means forget to restart the MySQL daemon. On Debian:
/etc/init.d/mysql restart
// Oliver