Apache!

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As of a bit after 5:00 PM Friday, our main webserver is running on Apache, rather than Sun's Java Enterprise System Webserver as it has been for years. Originally this change was meant as a test, but by late Friday night (AKA Saturday morning) things looked good enough that we decided to run with it.

Unfortunately, what looks good at 4:00 AM isn't always so great by the light of day. Ever since then I've been running around putting out fires.

Here's a brief list of the problems we've seen (most are already solved.)


  • Cold Fusion (.cfm) pages don't work on the new server. All those sites I've found have been redirected back to the old server where they do work.

  • Blog admin didn't work. I had to point that back to the old server too, for now.

  • Portal single-signon links weren't all working. The link for blog admin is fixed. The WOUAlert link isn't fixed yet, but at least I know the problem and am working on it.

  • PHP pages using old-style code block tags didn't work. Some people were coding PHP using the old, deprecated <? ?> tags to delimit blocks of PHP code. The correct way to do this is <?php ?>. I had to tell the new webserver to allow the old-school code, but we really need to get rid of it because it can get mixed up with other languages. BTW, this is what caused the quick links on the homepage not to work, so I'm not totally innocent here myself.

  • Old-style PHP database calls didn't work. I replaced the PEAR/DB module so some of this stuff will work again, but there might be other stuff made without PEAR/DB and with obsolete database tags that won't work until it is rewritten.

  • Overly tight security settings. Some pages weren't able to get external files that they needed and so were erroring out.

There's more, but I need to get back to that WOUAlert problem.

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This page contains a single entry by published on August 10, 2010 3:01 PM.

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