Website down time

By Darren Weeks

It never ceases to amaze me how something can work for a number of months, then suddenly begin to cause conflicts.

If you tried to access this site yesterday, or today and found it impossible to do so, I found that the culprit was a perl script which generates the random quote. The random quote is currently (as of this writing) located below the news items on the right-hand side of this page.

For some reason and without warning, it began to act up late last night. I attributed the lack of site access to limited bandwidth availability on the computer network that I was using at the time. In other words, I dismissed the problem as not being one associated with the web site itself.

Then, upon checking on it again this evening, I discovered that the site was completely down. I pulled the files from the server and they loaded successfully via the file transfer protocol (ftp). They would just not load by way of the standard hypertext transfer protocol (http).

After a period of troubleshooting, I narrowed the problem down to the tiny line of code that executes the perl script. Bear in mind, this script has functioned just beautifully for several months. Why did it pick now to start acting up?

Regardless, I made a slight modification to the script and the code that calls it, and varoom! We're back up and running. Hopefully, for good.

It's just so weird how these computers almost seem to have a mind of their own.