Typo upgrade

Posted by mde [ Wed, 04 Oct 2006 03:51:00 GMT ]

What was an easy upgrade on my home machine running Ubuntu Breezy turned into a horrid, cruel, excruciating process on this Debian server.

I was blown away by how smoothly the Rails migration went for the database (although Postgres 8.1 was little persnickety about some copy-pasted non-ASCII characters in a couple of posts in from the old 7.4 DB).

However, the weird flakiness of Typo once I got it up onto the production machine here was totally perplexing. Different errors in the log every time -- but always with the same consistent, fatal 500-error kerblooey.

As it turns out the problem was the mod_fcgid FastCGI module for Apache. Strangely, the same version of it runs Typo like a champ on them home machine. Not so much up on the server.

After wasting a couple of hours staring at the Rails logs, and multiple instances of that charming "Controller stack got out of kilter!" error message, I finally got the bright idea to swap out mod_fcgid for the older mod_fastcgi . Bingo, Typo is as happy as can be. I want those two hours of my life back.

I guess I wouldn't have had this problem in the first place if I were using Mongrel like all the cool kids.

In any case I am now running Typo 4, which gives me access to some shiny new features, like spam controls for comments, and this sexy new theme -- my take on the IAmRice theme by Damien Tanner .