Technical difficulties
As anyone who has been by in the last couple days already knows, I have hosed my site royaly. My apologies. Hopefully we will be returning to our regularly scheduled programming very soon.
As you can see, there is no sidebar. It took me a while but I narrowed the problem to that chunk of code. Removing the sideblocks allows the site to display but now I have to narrow down within the sideblocks to find the actual bit of code that’s trashing everything.
Originally the server didn’t actually crash, it was just non-responsive because my hard drive filled up due to my log files growing to big, which, yes, has happened before. After the last time I enabled a cleanup agent to purge the log but it failed to run because the log had gotten to big. Go figure.
All I needed to do was clean up the logs and everything would have been back to normal, but nooooo. I decided it would be a good time to update my server to the latest version, which I need to do from time to time because this whole operation is basically a sandbox; a playground where I keep my skills honed. So as soon as I bring up the new server, I start getting the 500 error. So I switch to my backup server, which I use for mail but it can serve the web site too if needed, and I’ll be damned if it weren’t trashed too. The backup server would not allow anonymous connections. The database wasn’t denying the connection, the server was. Damn.
There are only a couple of switchs to throw in order to allow anonymous HTTP connections over port 80. No matter what, the server just would not allow anyone who had not authenticated to access the server. If I entered a user name and password, no problem. No password, no access. I’ll have to tackle that one later. I switched back to my primary server–the one I had upraded–and meticulously narrowed the problem down to the sideblocks. Shouldn’t be too hard to find from there; it will probably be something I added recently or that had been broken since the last event with the spam.
Update - Hell, I think I may like the site better without the side bar.