Second time I have had this issue my blah.pl is no longer responding and i am now waiting for the webhosting company to let me know what the error is they see in their logs.

It seemed to happen when there were about 3 users online, I was one of them not logged in as admin just a regular user and was trying to send a PM to another user online.

I hit send and no response, an hour later and I have renamed my user.dat eg 4.dat to 4.datold in the hope of freeing up the system but this time to no avail.

I also reloaded blah.pl (in ascii) but no joy, even renamed a few more .dat files to .datold based on datestamp of which other users I thought may have been on at the time the software has ceased.

So now stuck, after having just widely promoted the forums to a bunch of folks.

The link to my site is http://zl4aa.org.nz/forum/Blah.pl?

Any files I can ftp and edit or look at to see what may be locked up and hopefully fix the prob again

Thanks

It looks like a server problem. I tried your forum and it wouldn't bring anything up, not even an error page. Do you have access to your server error logs?

8:00am EST
Dayton, Ohio, USA

We've never had any problems like you describe (except from you), so I'm not sure what's causing it.  I'm guessing it's a server issue.

thanks, i'm unsure until i get my hands on the error logs, waiting to her back from the webhost

OK I heard back from the webhost they said:

http://zl4aa.org.nz/forum/Blah.pl? - Support Contact Form

Thank you for your email.

> 1. have a look at the server logs and see if there are any errors being
> reported

The only errors there are 404 ones.

I feel like I'm facing a reinstall to try again from scratch to get it running.

I do have a backup from a week ago, I'm wondering if i unzip it (.tar) and upload in ascii the forum folder, perhaps delete the exsisting one alltogether, then upload the backup, then set permissions?

I blew out the forums dir, uploaded by 5 day old backup (worth doing!) and had to chmod settings.pl and ranks2.txt

It's back up and running but I am lost to know why it failed

Justin - is there a debug code I can enable that dumps any errors to a file if it's a .pl issue?

Which file do I chmod and what setting (666?) so I can make changes to boards (eg set who can start a poll) stick when I press save? If I make a change nothing is saving..

chmod settings.pl to 666 and that should fix it.

Quoted from Craig

chmod settings.pl to 666 and that should fix it.

Thanks did that and I still can't edit exsisting boards or create new ones,

I logged in a a general user and tried to do a test post and had a fatal error:

Cannot open the message data file: 1179611135.txt

when using Blah.pl?v-post/b-Chit/m-/post-1/

Any thoughts?

Rebuild your Boards in the Admin Center.

Quoted from Martin

Rebuild your Boards in the Admin Center.

Thanks Martin.

I think I'm back up and running now. Just taken a backup of all my efforts

I found I had to change a heck of alot of files via chmod to 666 to get it to fly.

Bit stuffed right now, long day but will post again with what I needed to do to get running.

I'm not confident that (for what ever reason) the whole thing may crash again

Paul

Quoted from zl4aa

Bit stuffed right now, long day but will post again with what I needed to do to get running.

After restoring from a backup , some folders and files were chmod to either 777 or 666 to get them to work or allow for changes in settings to stick, ip logs etc to be written to again etc.

The docs in blahdocs.com http://www.blahdocs.com/Performing_a_new_installation_of_E-Blah when I used them suggested setting Settings.pl to 755 chmod I see this has now changed to chmod 666 which has helped me.

I have also found other dirs not listed worked better for me when set chmod to 777 or files within were set to 666

I;m wondering if it's the nature of the site I use or??

There was a mistake with the docs...it should have never said to set Settings.pl to 755 .  As for all the other settings, they are set to work with the majority of webservers based on past experience.  Of course webservers change, so if we see a trend with one of the settings causing problems, we will adapt.

Thanks,
Craig.