Sometimes it seems that technology just conspires against us.
And often, it seems to happen the most, to those of us who have a good grasp of most things technical.
Most recently, I just noticed someone had replied to one of my posts.
The reply was in Russian, so I fire up google translate so that I could copy and paste the comment, translate, and then I could reply.
I then login to my website, write a reply, hit “submit comment”, and I get a page not found error.
Grrr
Ok, I’ve been getting quite a few “page not found” errors recently, and I figured it must be my hosting company (Netfirms). Why? In the past, when this happens, I navigate to netfirms.com, and I would get the same error, yet other websites would work just fine.
This time, I thought I’d also try viewing netfirms and computer-aid.com.au from a “different location”. Easily done using proxify.com
Proxify shows my website without any issues…
OK, back to by normal web browser, go to computer-aid.com.au and netfirms, and now they work.
Ooooh, I hate intermittent problems.
I hit a navigation button on my website, and I get a page not found error…
Hmmm
I try FTP, but that fails, as does ping and ssh. Its as if netfirms and all their hosted sites have suddenly disappeared…
Then I start to wonder: I’ve seen similar problems in the past.
It could be a DNS problem, or a hosting problem, or a transparent proxy problem with my ISP.
Just as I’m about to write some “please explain” emails to any possible culprits, everything starts working again…
sigh
I then go to my main blog page, and I get a “bad behaviour” error (my browser is behaving like a spam bot)… I don’t like where this is heading…
I re-check everything, and suddenly everything starts to work again… except:
I notice that only my home page is generating an error (everything else is fine)
Since the home page has some dynamic content (a short summary of my last 4 blog posts), I figure that maybe the script (runs once per day) that generates the main page, has gone haywire (it does that about once every 2 months).
OK, back to SSH, and I can’t login again.
Time for a 5 minute chocolate break (I love the Cote d’Or 70% & raspberries dark chocolate… yum… I really do need to exercise more… 
)
OK, back to SSH: now I can login (it must have been the chocolate 
)
yep, my index.html is only 243 bytes (it should be over 10,000 bytes).
I re-run the script to generate index.html, but the file is still 243 bytes.
I look at the contents of the file, and I see an error message about “cannot read RSS feed”
OK, I point my browser at http://www.computer-aid.com.au/blog/feed
Sure enough I get: Access is denied. Error processing resource
I also login to my wordpress admin panel, and I see my scheduled post for a few hours ago didn’t get posted. A “missed schedule” error under the failed post.
OK, I post it manually.
Now, where was I?
Oh yes, index.html
I disable the script and go back to a purely static home page.
Now, where was I before that?
Oh yes: failing RSS feed.
Thats possibly due to using feedburner, and the “possible” netfirms outage (which I can’t really confirm… I wish netfirms had an outage “bulletin” so I could at least confirm my problems are not some strange blocks on my end.
Anyway, I’ll give it a few hours and then see if it fixes itself.
Now, back to replying to the blog comment.
I write the blog comment (for the second time), and this time it works.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has these time warps… a two minute job take an hour or two to complete.
I sometimes wonder if its worth it.
And whats worse, I still don’t know where the problem is, nor if it will happen again.
Grrr
PS: I have since disabled “bad behavior” and my website seems more reliable… I’ll keep monitoring and see what happens.
Related posts:
- Computer Aid blog outage As many of you will have noticed, the Computer Aid blog (and even the main website) stopped working for a...
- blocking blog comment spam (blam?) using akismet and bad behaviour Some of you might have noticed that this blog doesn’t have many comments, and none of them are spam. This is...
- Is blog comment spam declining? Since the start of August 2007, I’ve noticed the number of spam comments being captured by my blog spam blockers...
- top 9 things you shouldn’t do on your blog After having visited many blogs and websites recently, I can see where some people are making mistakes. If you don’t want...
- pioneer dvr-111 writing problem My neighbour recently bought a pioneer dvr-111 drive, but was having problems copying CDs (he has a P3 800Mhz). I...
Online Car Insurance says: