Error 500 when commenting

by Volker Weber

This is a bit frustrating. Wednesday afternoon I noticed you could no longer comment on posts and I could not get into the CMS. Usually these things repair themselves since I am on a shared hosting platform that is closely monitored. Servers get restarted, things go back to normal.

Not this time. I contacted the hosting service Thursday morning and got a quick and friendly reaction. They were looking into it and came up with an explanation: I was migrated to the new platform and unfortunately they would no longer support 32bit but only 64bit scripts. What? 64bit scripts? Scripts aren't binary. Something did not compute.

I put together a quick Perl script that tries to open my database.

use DBI;
use CGI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:database...) || die "Could not connect to database: $DBI::errstr";

It bombs right away. Wrote the same thing in PHP and that works like a charm. Then I checked the hosting services' own scripts, like those checking for free space, and they bombed as well. So I let the services team know and they promised to escalate. That was Thursday morning.

Thursday evening I got a quick status message. They found the error and would fix it. Now it's Friday afternoon, and they haven't gotten around to fix database access from cgi. I asked again and the new update is that it might take days. And since it is Friday, well, well, well.

Plan B is already underway. Rebuild the site on a different platform. My money is on Stefan to get this site up (in his spare time) before the others can fix their own mistake.

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