Problems with my Webhost
Published Thu, Feb 8 2007 9:00 AM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet, Software Development, Annoyances
I've tried to be diligent about fixing a few bugs that some of you have found. Bernie and Butch both encountered some problems in the trackback module that I fixed last night. Both of the problems were related to changes in the way I validate trackback pings by parsing the HTML of your posts.
The problem Bernie found had to do with HTML Anchors without HREFs. These allow you to link to a location within a page. My parsing code threw exceptions when it encountered these, and ended up rejecting the trackback because it couldn't finish parsing the page.
I fixed that problem and uploaded the binaries to my web host last night. Things were working good. The new code added lots of diagnostics to help identify other problems in the future.
Then I tried to find out why Butch's pings were failing. It turned out that there was a bit of broken HTML in his page that looked like an HTML Anchor, and it has got an HREF, but the HREF is broken. My parser again threw exceptions, and rejected the trackback.
So I coded a fix for that and uploaded the binaries to my web host again. Except that as soon as the binaries were uploaded, the site quit working. ASP.NET wouldn't compile it, because it couldn't load Microsoft.mshtml.dll.
That seemed strange to me, and it was exactly the same problem I had on Tuesday night. It was strange, because the DLL was present on the web host, and it hadn't changed. I tried re-uploading it, and an error occurred transferring the file.
For the next two hours I tried uploading the file. Every time I did, an error occurred. I tried using WEBDAV to upload the file. I tried using FrontPage to upload the file. I tried using my web host's "file manager" web application. None of them worked. I tried FTP and found that some timeout was happening near the end of the transfer.
I uploaded a "site-offline" page and updated the configuration files to redirect to it when ASP.NET couldn't load the site.
This morning, I transferred the exact same binaries to the website that I transferred last night. No errors, and the Website is back.
Let me know if you encounter any problems. Let me know also if you find any bugs in the site that need fixing. I'll try to get them all fixed as soon as I can.
I just hope I can get them transferred to the server successfully when I've done it.
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Butch responded with:
Perri,
I'll try to send you a tb tonight when I get home...thanks
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