Tim Fogarty’s Blog

So I host about a dozen webistes on a hosting reseller’s plan. Flat monthly rate for unlimited domain names and bandwidth that I doubt I’ll ever exceed. Most of the sites are pretty generic, like fogarty.org, but others are complex php and mysql installations, such as musclememory.com.

Generally I’ve been happy with the hosting company, but they do have a habit of changing things without giving any advanced notice. Today, I woke up to find five of the sites not working at all. I quickly noticed that php scripts that included things from my php_include directory were failing. What’s worse, is that they were all failing without any error messages. Even inserting deliberate errors in the php code caused no error messages. I deduced that my php.ini file was not being picked up. (some sites use .htaccess, others php.ini) The most likely cause is the flag “AllowOverride” was changed in the php startup procedure.

My guess is they installed a new version of php and didn’t realize they changed a param or two. I filled out a support ticket, and two hours later got an email stating it was bumped up to a higher authority.

Since I can’t have all my systems down for hours and hours, I had to go edit a dozen or so files and add ini_set() for a half dozen parameters, including php_include, display_errrors, and a few session params. everything is back up and running, but now that I’ve hardcoded directory locations (and that each website has it’s own hardcoded value), things are no longer compatible with my home development environment in Eclipse.

And I wasted four hours fixing a problem that shouldn’t have occurred at all.

I’ve been a sys admin for most of my career, supporting both development and production environments. The overriding rule was always “first of all, do no harm.” You don’t break production systems. I think the problem is that my service provider doesn’t see these as production systems.

update: The hosting company finally confirmed that they upgraded PHP from 5.0.5 to 5.1.4 today, and that probably is the cause of my problems, but that they didn’t intentionally change any params. Still haven’t convinced them to check the setting for the AllowOverride flag or to change it back.