not logged in users unable to see any nodes (solution offered)

Just a short post to make a problem (and solution) Googleable.

I've been working with Drupal 6 to create a language-learning site that aggregates and annotates news content. Anyone interested in learning Chinese might actually want to check it out: http://newsinchinese.com

Anyway, shortly after installation logged out users (users who were not logged in) were suddenly unable to access content. The content was still there for administrators, but everyone else was getting the main page ("Welcome to Drupal...") etc. After a bit of investigation, the problem turned out to be that the node_access table had been emptied by something, perhaps one of the modules I've been playing around with.

In any event, the problem was solved by manually adding content to the node_access table. Specifically, the following command worked:

> INSERT INTO `node_access` VALUES (0,0,'all',1,0,0);

Hopefully this will save someone else time.