The following events take place in the hours shortly after midnight Saturday night. It's the story of how a web page ruined my weekend.
I had a problem posting to this weblog this weekend. I saved an entry but it did not show up on the home page. Further investigation showed that the entry made it to my RSS feeds and the individual archive. The only thing that wasn't working was the home page. I made sure i didn't accidentally set the type to "draft" and republished. Still no change. Just to make sure it wasn't a permissions thing, i deleted the main index page and rebuilt the whole site. No change. I started fiddling with the "date posted" field to see if maybe it was some weird sorting thing. That made no difference. Finally i figured maybe it was just some bug in MovableType (i was running version 2.65, which is slightly behind current release).
I went to the MovableType home page hoping to get version 2.661 as i didn't think i was ready for 3.0D just yet. I didn't see a separate download for it and i did some search and thought i read that the 2.661 version would come with 3.0 so i choose that download. To get the file, you first have to register with TypeKey, SixApart's fancy new authentication system. Ok, whatever, i filled out the form to register. It kicked me to a login screen to actually get the file. I put in my username and password, and, several seconds later, i'm presented with a single-line "site error" message. That's odd so i try again. Same thing. I check my email and see a new item from TypeKey with a link to verify my email address. I clicked the link only to discover that was another way to get my friend the "site error" message. It was not a pleasant reunion.
I was now a bit mad. I walked away from the computer for a while hoping it was a temporary server fluke. After about ten minutes, everything seemed to be working without a problem. I was able to successfully download the MT 3.0D upgrade package. I moved all the files over to my web server without much hassle. I ran the mt-upgrade30.cgi script; it bombed. Another google search turned up an explanation that my error was caused by my MTBlacklist plug-in which is not compatible with 3.0. I was aware of that but forgot to get rid of it. I renamed "Blacklist.pl" in my "plugins" folder to "Blacklist.disabled." I ran the upgrade script again with no errors. I thought i was finally done.
I go to login to my newly upgraded admin area, but nothing seemed to be happening. I enter my username and password but i kept coming back to the same login screen. No error message or nothing. If I entered an invalid username, it would give me an "invalid login" message, but when i entered what i believed to my correct credentials -- nothing! Grrrr. I jumped back on to the MT Support forums to see if others were experiencing the same thing. I found a few threads that mimicked my symptoms. It seems to be a problem with certain versions of IIS and come redirect/cookie thing, but apparently the only workaround is to go back to version 2.661. What's up with that.
OK, so version 2.661 -- that's what i wanted all along, but i never saw it. It was definitely not in in the 3.0D download. Where was it? I thought this would be another quick google search, but no. People said you could download if from TypeKey but I didn't find it anywhere. Finally i found someone who posted a direct link to the page where it can be found. (If you can tell me how to navigate to this page i will be impressed.) I found my link to download MovableType 2.661. I went ahead and copied the files over to the web server, hoping that is all that would be required to downgrade. I know that the upgrade cgi script updates the database, but apparently it shouldn't cause a problem with going back to 2.661.
Now i'm back to my more familiar admin login page. I enter my username and password, click the login button, and - bam - "invalid login." At this point i figure either Ben or Mena is just out to get me. So what could be wrong now. Well, back when i was trying to login to my 3.0 install, i clicked the "recover password" just to make sure i was using the correct account. It failed on me because it tried to send it to me using (the default) SendMail which wasn't active on my web host's server. Apparently, that feature doesn’t just send you your password, it resets your password to something new. The only way to get the new password is by e-mail (which i wasn't getting). So i dug through the config file to see if i had any other email options. I was able to move it over to user SMTP and set it up with my mail server. I retried the link, got the new password, and was finally able to log in again.
I was now running 2.661. I clicked the "rebuild" button to fix my home page. I clicked my Safari bookmark to see the final result of all of my hard work - and - nothing. My new entry still hadn't shown up. I spent all those hours playing with my MT installation for nothing.
New plan of attack: maybe it's my template. Normally, my blog main page will show all entries from the last nine days. I changed it to just show the last ten entries (again thinking it might have something to do with the date). Another rebuild, then back to the main index. Again nothing changed. There weren't even ten entries on the home page like my template said. I then changed the title tag in the template. But still nothing changed. I deleted the main index, refreshed my browser, but it was still there. I had no idea where this piece of history was coming from.
After all that, it turned out to be some crazy IIS page caching problem. It had nothing to do with MovableType at all. We had something similar happen at one point at work which is the only reason i stopped there. I contacted my web host who disabled ASP page caching and that seemed to fix it.
Lesson learned.
Posted by Matthew at June 14, 2004 08:36 PM