So far, I’m not pleased with the way the year has started.
Friday, someone left a message that they couldn’t stay logged in to Benny’s Catfight forums. (Running version 6.23 of DCForum, developer no longer supports it, website has nothing on it, originally downloaded on 8/29/04, it’s old, but it works…well, it did…) I tried, I couldn’t stay logged in. I logged in to the admin and every time I tried looking at a different option, I had to log in. Totally not right.
So, I contacted my host, since the forums had worked the day before. They hadn’t done anything to their servers, no upgrades. Well, I didn’t believe them. In the past stuff like this has happened and it turned out to be they upgraded this software or that and it affected how programs on my website functioned. I researched the internet and found installation instructions for my software. I changed some permissions (geeks will understand what this means) and it was keeping me logged in. I thought it was fixed.
We had a date Friday, it was our 25th anniversary. We went to see True Grit (good movie) and then dinner at TGI Friday’s, which was awful. It was so bad that when I walked out, I told Brian I didn’t want to eat there ever again. He said to give it at least one more chance.
When we got home, I turned my computer back on and found I’d been logged out of Benny’s and I couldn’t stay logged in. Same thing with the administration area. I worked on it, deleting all of the files in the directory and doing a clean install just there. If there was something wrong there, it was somewhere in those files.
I worked on it until about nine Friday night without luck. There was no way I was going to stay up all night. But I did go to bed and laid there, thinking of what my options were. And I decided I’d do a clean install of the software (I finally found the original zip file on my system, after running a search, it was in my email; I copied it to my downloaded software directory) on two of my other websites. One is hosted by the same company that hosts catler.org, but is on a different server, the other one I’d install over at lvdesigns.com. Just to see what happened there.
So, I get up bright and early yesterday to work on it. Got the software installed on one site, was working on the other one when Brian said he wanted to go to breakfast, not have cold cereal here. He didn’t feel like cooking. Neither did I, I had a puzzle I wanted to solve.
So, we get back from breakfast (went to the Lakeside Cafe, I had the mushroom, spinach and cheese omelet with a side of sour cream and fruit; the fruit was watermelon) and I got back to work.
Did all the coding needed to get the program working on the other websites, installed, and running. And I logged in.
And on both, the same thing happened. I couldn’t stay logged in.
This narrowed it down to the code. Something with a date.
I opened up the entire Lib directory (the directory that holds all of the files that make the program work) in cutehtml and searched for “2010”. And there it was. One instance. In the global.pl file.
$r_setup->{'expires'} = “Fri, 31-Dec-2010 12:00:00 GMT”;
It was set to self-destruct on 12-31-2010, noon Greenwich Mean Time. Easy enough to fix.
I changed the date to 2030. Saved it, uploaded it. It worked. I stayed logged in. I rebooted the computer three times and each time, I was staying logged in. I uploaded all of the saved files back into the directory, and let everyone know it was good to go.
Then this morning I see my weather page was last updated at 7:10pm last Thursday. Brian’s on his computer. My weather station computer. I get antsy. He says “go ahead and do what you need to do”. Since the weather software wasn’t running, I started it up. But the images weren’t being generated. 
I rebooted his computer, thinking that whatever shut the weather software down, would work on a clean start.
It didn’t.
So, I went to the place where I got the software, downloaded the upgrade (I got it so long ago, back when the developer was fairly new and got in on the free upgrades for life thing), upgraded the software and the images were once again generated the way they were supposed to be.
But my new year started this morning, according to the weather station. It kind of sucks because we’ve had some pretty low temps the past couple of days. And they’re not recorded.
Ah, well, I can hope that’s the end of software problems for a while.
