dreamhost strikes again
June 11th, 2007 by herichon
So, a few days ago (when I made that last post below actually), I found that – surprise, surprise – my site was down again. It’s a bit unnerving, as rarely as I actually work on amphichon these days, how often I find it down or broken when I do go to work on it. This time around I was getting 500 errors when I hit the main blog page, although some of the subdomain and back-end pages were still responding.
So I submitted a trouble ticket with Dreamhost. My first attempt to submit the ticket was cheerily dismissed by their automated system – “everything looks fine to us! =D” – so I had to submit it again. After a while one of the support guys got back to me and said “It looks like one of your plugins is bad, you should try disabling them! :D” Immediately I wrote back – quite reasonably, I thought – to say “Well, see, nothing has changed on my site for months, so if it suddenly failed, doesn’t it seem likely that something on your side changed?” Dreamhost support guy said, “Well, actually yes, we upgraded PHP a couple of weeks ago, that must have been it! Your plugins probably broke then!! ;D~~~” (No, Dreamhost doesn’t append emoticons to every communication, but they really are this cheery.)
Now, I know for a fact that everything on the site was still working properly after the PHP upgrade – I had just checked it a couple of days prior. Still, I didn’t feel like arguing the point, especially since I found that by disabling my Textile2 plugin, the site came back up. So I shrugged and left it disabled until I had occasion to look into it further, and in the meantime told Mr. Happy Dreamhost Guy, “Fine, I disabled a plugin, it’s working, kthxbye.”
Today I finally get around to looking into it further. My first stop is the Textile 2 plugin’s homepage, where I find this:
Testing Textile-2 for WP
Apparently, Dreamhost has botched their server configs somehow and the current incarnation of Textile-2.1 is failing miserably. It is something inside of the class that is broken on a very deep level, and at this point it seems to be nigh impossible to fix with my limited time…
Aha! So Dreamhost blames Textile2, and Textile2 blames Dreamhost. Who to believe? Well, since Textile has been solid since the day I set it up, and Dreamhost has been cheerily flaky several times (and I’ve specifically seen them hose my server configs more than once), I’m going to have to side with Textile’s author on this one.
Either way, please excuse the mess as we get this sorted out. Having Textile turned off means that a lot of the auto-formatting I’ve had in place is no longer active, and specifically I see that a lot of my embedded links are broken, but luckily everything is still readable, and really, since no one is reading this but me now anyway, and I’ve already been to all those sites, no one should really give a tinker’s damn one way or the other. Yay!
Oh, by the way, Dreamhost: grr. Quit breaking shit.
UPDATE
Okay, looking further into this, the blame thing gets a bit murkier. Apparently the Textile2 implementation from the folks at idly.org is having some problems with the latest version of PHP, though why it should have taken two weeks to kick in on amphichon is hard to understand. The good news is that there is an alternate Textile wrapper plugin available from the folks at Huddled Masses, and replacing idly.org’s implementation with this one seems to have resolved the issue for now.
Dreamhost: all right, well, don’t get cocky, you know it could just as easily been you. Grr.
Yup. I’ve gone digging in the class, but as it is something that causes php to dump core, instead of output a normal php error, my debugging skillset is outmatched.
So, if someone has a suggestion, I’m game to try it, otherwise, I’ve been testing a new version of the plugin that uses a different textile class (the one packaged with Textpattern). It seems to be working fine, just hacking together the update to the config panel now.