Today I saw a case where MySQL server is writing its binlog entries to the error log file ‘mysqld.err’ instead of writing it to regular binlog. This is happening with MySQL version 4.0.26 and not sure how it was triggered.
I am guessing it could be because the file handles got swapped, it can not be a memory overrun or anything else as I can see the error log is getting the right binlog entries. I am still trying to find what could have caused this to happen. This happened twise so far from the same property with the same setup; even though there is more than an year in between. If you restart the server or upon issuing FLUSH LOGS, everything will be back to normal.
tnebeR Hello Perdun! Google.