Oops some people got cached…

lprent
15 years ago
Categories: admin

Sysop

Sorry to anyone who thought that The Standard hadn’t published anything today. The site had in fact been pretty active for a Monday. You got caught by a wee mistake by me*

I moved the site to a more accessible location on the server in preparation for updates in the free time between now and New Years. But I made a screwup in the permissions for the SuperCache directories and siteXML files*. It managed to feed yesterdays pages from the cache to some of our audience today.

Some browsers and proxy caches served up the old cached pages conforming to the site hints. Most requested new pages. I’ll be going back through the logs to figure out what exactly was happening – it should allow me to tweak more performance out of the hardware by shifting caching rules. Of course that will make it more obvious if I ever screw up the same way again.

But it is a lot more productive and transparent than letting it silently disenfranchise readers. After all I’m not a NACT elitist who finds that there are more favors to be gained if everything is kind of opaque and Key-like – like their versions of of the EFA and ETS (reminds me of the Muldoon era of gerrymandered electorates and SMP’s mostly) 😈

Then I would also be able to see the fault myself during testing. There was a lot of testing yesterday. But after it was reported by addicts in the afternoon, I tested on Ubuntu linux, iPhone and Windoze 2000/XP/Vista on linux virtualbox. I also tested on browsers, Firefox, Safari, Seamonkey, Opera, Konquerer, and even Internet Explorer versions 6-8 on appropriate platforms. I also tested on 3 different internet links for possible proxy errors. No errors. That was all that I had on me at the time, so eventually I went to the house of a reader to look at the damn error in the evening..

My only OS/X box is hooked up as a media PC to the TV at home. OS/X doesn’t run in a linux hosted virtualbox legally because of Apples crappy hardware restricted license. So following the prophet Murphy, that seems to be what was affected with both Firefox and Safari getting the problem. I’d be interested if other people had a Groundhog day that wasn’t on a mac…

All fixed now*

Lynn

* For the techies. I moved the code from a system location to one accessible to my personal login, and linked it back to the original location. I changed the user ownership of all files to my login and apache’s group on the server. The problem was that the existing relevant write and execute permissions for the cache were on the user not the group. They were octal 640 and 740 rather 660 and 770 respectively. So after I changed user ownership to myself wordpress didn’t have permission to write new cache files or to delete the existing ones.