Misc. Ramblings

You may have noticed that email, comments, and trackbacks have been having problems. Sorry, but I'm running into three road blocks.

The first one is that my mailbox ran out of space and I didn't know this until yesterday afternoon. I don't know why pair.com doesn't have some way of monitoring email space usage but, apparently, they don't. I also don't know for sure when the box got full but it may have been several days. In any case, I've expanded the space for email by six times so hopefully things won't fill up for awhile. But what is really weird is that I can delete recent emails (i.e., today) but older email refuses to be deleted. I don't know why and I guess I'll have to open another trouble ticket with pair.com.

The second problem is that the notification that I'm supposed to get when a comment is posted isn't working. I don't know why. It may be related to the problem with email being full but it may predate that. It could also be related to scripts not running correctly (as in the 505 error I get when rebuilding categories) or it could be something else.

Why be concerned about no notification? First of all, because I can't respond to your comments if I don't know you left one. Secondly, if a spammer leaves a comment, I also won't know its been left so I can't know to delete it.

So, I closed comments yesterday (and trackbacks a few days ago). I will try re-opening comments today but may close them again if I don't get consistent notices. You can still contact me via email (my contact if over there on the right column under "Links" and should be working...I hope).

Speaking of 505 errors. I've completed my test re-creation of my site on my local hard drive. By that I mean I installed MoveableType (and MySQL) on my PC. I then imported all my posts from pair.com to my local installation. Once done, I rebuilt the local site and had no problems with 505 errors. Although this may not be a perfect simulation, it's close enough for me. I believe my problems with 505 errors are located on the pair.com site. What is the cause of the these problems I can only speculate.

I opened a trouble ticket with pair.com and got a response back today. They say the server log has the following:

Useless use of private variable in void context at /link/to/home/page/mt-check.cgi line 318.

Wayne, from pair.com, pointed to the following link: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/kb/known/useless_use_of.html

Question

When running mt-check.cgi under cgiwrap, it fails with the error Useless use of private variable in void context at mt-check.cgi line 318.

Answer

Open mt-check.cgi in a plain text editor and look for line 318:

$dbi_is_okay if $mod eq 'DBI';

and change it to this:

$dbi_is_okay = 1 if $mod eq 'DBI';

Save the file, upload it back to the server in ASCII, then try executing it again

This solves the 505 error with running mt-check.cgi (which is run only once during installation and is used to check to see if you have the required modules on your server. But, as far as I know, it is never run after that so it doesn't solve my other error with rebuilding categories. Sigh.

I've asked if I have access to the server log. If so, I will take a look at it and see if I can find anything relating to the Categories error (which is still occurring).

Aloha!