Help:About/archive/server

Current Status

2007-04-26 All pages should be working now, but some descriptive text will be missing from a few of them. I am working on a way around this problem, and the solution should bring some other improvements along with it. Stay tuned...

Past Issues

2007-04-23 10:15 The server migration is complete, but most pages are temporarily broken due to a missing Perl library. This should be fixed soonish (hosting company issue, not something we can really fix from here).

2007-04-21 There will be a server upgrade sometime this weekend, and the vbz checkout will be down for 1-3 days while the SSL certificate is moved (we have been told it will be back up no later than Monday morning); we apologize for the inconvenience. The entire site will also be going down for a couple of hours as it is moved to a faster machine.

2007-03-01 Some emails may have been lost between the afternoon of 2007-02-28 and the next morning; if you sent email around that time and didn't receive an answer, please resend. The problem is now fixed.

11:21, 27 November 2006 (EST): Ack! In the process of trying to fix the previous problem, I created a new one which was preventing people from checking out. However, I fixed this one in about 5 minutes, and everything should be working now. For real this time. Really.

13:58, 25 November 2006 (EST): (resolved; problem was:) certain items are refusing to be added to the shopping cart. So far all of the problem items seem to be Mountain shirts. No error is generated, and other items can be added just fine, so I don't know how long this has been going on. I am working on it right now. Update: The browser (Firefox, in all 3 cases where the problem could be replicated, but I don't know that anyone tried any other browser) was somehow switching between www.vbz.net and vbz.net during the adding-to-cart process, so that the items were getting added to the cart whose cookie was associated with vbz.net but then displaying the cart whose cookie was associated with www.vbz.net. Or possibly vice-versa. Solution: All references to the cart now explicitly specify vbz.net as the domain. (Maybe I should make it cart.vbz.net later...)

14:20, 10 June 2006 (EDT): Just fixed a problem which was only showing up in KHTML-based browsers (including Safari and Konqueror) – the <select> tag was not properly closed on the "single item" drop-down box. Apparently Firefox tolerates this impropriety.

08:20, 29 April 2006 (EDT): Just discovered a minor issue in that none of the "rotating" images (mostly backgrounds, but also the main logo) seem to work in Windows (Firefox or MSIE), though they come up fine in Linux. Mysterious and annoying. (Fixed this. Some browsers apparently need the http headers for images to include the file length.)

07:29, 29 April 2006 (EDT): Items are not being added to the cart, or at least not reliably. Working on this. (Update: apparently this was a local problem with my browser. I really need to put up a Bug Bounty so I can be sure that I hear about them if they affect other people.)

14:09, 24 April 2006 (EDT): Once again, the SSL pages were down for several days, although for a completely different reason than the last time. The problem has been fixed. Also, the email web form was down; I'm fixing that too. I'm considering offering a prize (free t-shirt, perhaps) to the first person to report any significant problem with the site, but I'll need to write up some rules on what that involves. (Update, later that evening: email form is now working.)

21:00, 11 April 2006 (EDT): the SSL server was down, probably for several days (I did notice the reduction in orders, but was rather busy and didn't think to do a test order), but has now been fixed. If you were having trouble earlier, please try again...

16:09, 28 February 2006 (EST) There was a problem with the shopping cart refusing to accept new items (due to some code changes which should make it work better in general), but that problem has now been fixed. (The rest of the ordering system does not seem to have been affected.)

2006-01-03 11:07 EST: The SSL server appears to be down – which means that when you press the "checkout" button, nothing happens for a long time and then your browser tells you that the page cannot be loaded. We are working on this; please check back in an hour or three. If you have items in your cart, they should still be there (we discard inactive carts after a minimum of 48 hours, often longer). Fixed 11:38 EST

2005-12-28 Things are still settling down after a major server migration on 12/26 (faster server with more RAM and more disk space); domains may not all be pointing to the right places, which may cause occasional error dialogs. Everything seems to be working, however.

2005-12-13 the search engine doesn't seem to be searching artist names. Unfortunately I probably won't have time to work on this until the weekend at the earliest. (This was fixed shortly before 12/25, and I added searching by (title's) catalog number as well, yay!)

2005-11-16 21:43 Unbeknownst to me (because no errors were being generated), the shopping cart data script was broken for about a day in that it was not storing data from customer orders. Everything seemed to be working fine, and even the confirmation emails went out looking correct, but the actual data was missing. Fortunately, I can reconstruct the missing orders from the email confirmations, but unfortunately this does not (for security reasons) include credit card numbers... so I'm having to contact the customers whose orders were dropped and have them send in their information again.

2005-11-08 09:52 The search page and adding-items-to-cart were both generating 500 errors. Solution: deleted all static dbm files so they would get regenerated; apparently they became unwritable for some reason. (Maybe the file data was damaged?)

The shopping cart script has mysteriously started generating Internal Server Errors whenever an item is added (if you just go to the cart page without adding anything, it displays properly). Currently working on this. --Woozle 15:46, 12 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Update #1: Apparently our webhost went and installed FastCGI on the server with no warning, which apparently breaks the Perl DBM hash-writing functions. Currently trying to find out if there's any way around this problem. --Woozle 18:13, 12 Oct 2005 (EDT)

Update #2 (problem resolved): Apparently it was even simpler than that; there was a Perl library file (cgi-lib.pl) which one script library depended on, and either the library itself got moved or else the path got altered. Not sure which. --Woozle 21:32, 12 Oct 2005 (EDT)