[conspire] (forw) Re: Your web-site Causes Firefox to Download the Pages Instead of Viewing Them

[Rick Moen]

FYI.

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:13:48 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il>
Subject: Re: Your web-site Causes Firefox to Download the Pages Instead of
	Viewing Them
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Shlomi Fish (shlomif at iglu.org.il):

> your web-site causes firefox to download the pages instead of viewing them in 
> the browser's viewport. 

1.  Your error report is uselessly vague.  As the co-author of 'How to
Ask Questions the Smart Way', I find this distressing.  As a person with
significant technical ability, you really have no excuse, frankly.

2.  I've just spent about eight hours I could not afford fixing problems
occasioned by an emergency upgrade of parts of my system from
Debian-stable to Debian-testing.  I could give you additional details,
but I'd frankly rather go to sleep.  The remaining breakage, after a
_great_ deal of productive work, consists solely of user public_html
pages only, to the best of my knowledge.  Not that your utterly and
completely useless error report either adds to or corrects that
knowledge or does anything other than chew up my time.

3.  If I am able to find time to fix user public_html support prior to
my much-deserved and at this point unmovable holiday for a week in New
Zealand and Australia on Wednesday, in addition to last minute
cumulative emergencies at work, I will do so.  If I don't find that
time, tough luck for you.

4.  Next time, kindly send an error report that doesn't suck.


----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:00:47 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Rob Markovic <rob.markovic at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: BayLISA SugarCRM instance is up
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Rob Markovic (rob.markovic at gmail.com):

> Just wanted to check in with you regarding SugarCRM..
>
> Were you able to verify your account and log in by using the admin
> credentials to modify the user account?
>
> There was another issue with PHP on solaris from sunfreeware, where it
> wasn't compiled with the imap module, so certain email campaign
> functionality won't be working.

Hi, Rob!  Thanks for checking.

I was in the middle of attempting that and found myself needing to
upgrade a bunch of software on my own server in order to enable
relaying of outbound SMTP from baylisa.extragalactic.net, which
upgrade effort in turn broke a number of things on my server,
which I'm still in the middle of fixing.  (As you'll note, I got
SMTP back quickly.  Next up is back-revving MySQL back to 5.0,
doing table repair, and then attempting 5.1 a second time.  Then,
maybe figuring out why my httpd suddenly thinks it can't handle PHP5
any more.)

All told, I've not yet had a chance to get back to the SugarCRM
instance, but maybe soon (if I can get other things done before
I have to leave for a trip abroad on Wednesday).


----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: Rob Markovic <rob.markovic at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: BayLISA SugarCRM instance is up
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting Rob Markovic (rob.markovic at gmail.com):

> Oh my, sounds like I've unleashed a cerberus dragon upon you :) My
> apologies.

Eh, it would have happened sooner or later, anyway.  ;->

An earlier judgement error (early 2010) had left my system partly
on Debian-stable and partly on Debian-testing, which is a really bad
idea.  A couple of things were unhappy, but I'd not carried out the
steps to forward-revision everything to Debian-testing out of a fear
that there would be considerable breakage and require me to do a
marathon of emergency system rebuilding.

So, when I tried to tweak my MTA to accept a forwarder IP _and_ ran one
of the system maintenance scripts to regenerate the MTA configuration
files, it was a bit depressing when said script broke _and_ left the MTA
rejecting all new mail.

That was depressing because SMTP is the one service I can't have down
for more than a day, so I bit the bullet and started fixing.

That, in turn, lead to my discovering to my dismay that the
Debian-testing version of MySQL, v. 5.1, rejected my database files as
supposedly damaged -- and the utilities to repair MySQL DB files require
that MySQL be running.  So, at that point, I had to figure out how to
strip out all of the Debian-testing packages related to MySQL, plus all
packages that depend on MySQL, and then manually reinstall individual
MySQL-related packages from Debian-stable.

Further bad news followed:  The Debian-stable release of MySQL found
nothing wrong with those tables, and I'm not enough of a MySQL expert to
do a full database revision in-place, so instead I did a 'mysqldump
--all-databases > alltables-$(date +%F).sql'.  Then stop mysql.  Then,
blow away /var/lib/mysql.  Then re-upgrade to all of the 5.1 package
versions.  Then do 'mysql < alltables-$(date +%F).sql' to rebuild from
the dump file.

At this point, I have everything except PHP working, so I'm back
on-track to go on vacation.

There were other misadventures, such as the MTA resuming the  
reject-everything behaviour, which turned out to involve a bunch of
related packages not having gotten updated yet to Debian-testing
versions as part of the fallout from MySQL bombing.  So, that ate an
hour or two, but is much better now.

> Let me know how you'd like to proceed.

Sorry if it seems like a cop-out, but I'm sorta out of time, and am soon
going to be off to New Zealand and Australia for a bit over a week.

----- End forwarded message -----