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Is anyone else having problems with the RSS feed from this site?
I've had very irregular updates today (nothing for two or three hours, then most of the posts, then a couple that should have been in the middle of the last lot, and so forth). The RSS here has never been exactly brilliant, but it's a lot worse than usual - not sure if it's because of the server updates here, or because I've recently upgraded to Firefox 2 and upgraded my InfoRSS add-on accordingly (seems to work OK with other sites like the BBC, but it may not like here!)
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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marc
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Needs to get a life! |
Registered: March 2003
Messages: 4729
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I never was able to get the thing to work at all.....
Life is great for me... Most of the time... But then I meet people online... Very few are real friends... Many say they are but know nothing of what it means... Some say they are, but are so shallow...
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It's not specifically the Firefox upgrade -- I use the RSS reader in Thunderbird (to check for new posts when I read my email) and it's currently telling me: "http://forum.iomfats.org/w-agora/rss.php is not a valid RSS feed". I haven't updated Thunderbird or changed its configuration recently.
It's been intermittently doing that for a few weeks. It usually fixes itself after a couple of hours.
David
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There is a bug in the RSS feed -- it produces invalid RSS files if someone uses certain symbols in a post. After a few more people have posted, that particular post drops out of the feed and all is okay again.
This is the segment of the feed source causing the problems:
http://www.davidjoy.org/rss-problem.txt
The reason it won't accept it is because of the two '£'s in the description field. I assume that's because, by the RSS specification, these are not allowed to appear in that field.
You can fix it easily if you get the PHP script to strip any HTML character codes.
Thus:
http://www.davidjoy.org/rss.xml -- the original, broken newsfeed
http://www.davidjoy.org/rss-corrected.xml -- a valid newsfeed with the £s removed.
Tim -- this is a trivial bug and it would be really great if you or Megaman could have a look.
Thanks,
David
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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I'll ask Megaman to look at it. Right now we have a more pressing issue with a totally broken email system for no reason whatsoever. We're in discussions with our host because we think the kernel may be broken somehow.
Please remind me after the weekend.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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We really installed the feed to be accessed from the ticker, by the way.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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thanks Deeej and timmy !
Obviously the e-mail problem takes priority as it affects far more people, but it's good to think that the RSS thing shouldn't be too difficult to sort in due time.
"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. ... Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night devoid of stars." Martin Luther King
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Timmy said,
>We're in discussions with our host because we think the kernel may be broken somehow.
If you need any help, I'd be happy to lend a hand. I have quite a lot of experience in debugging dodgy mail systems, from the outside in as well as the inside out.
Assuming the system's running on Linux, I'd be extremely surprised if it was something to do with the kernel. The kernel does not send mail; it only provides a platform for the rest of the OS to sit on. If something as complicated as the web site's running okay, the problem is much more likely to be either with the mail software or configuration; conceivably a DNS or firewalling issue. Maybe a corrupted filesystem, but that's very different from the kernel.
David
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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We suspect the issue is either at the level of the virtualisation of the server (we have a virtual dedicated server) or at the OS level on the virtual server, because we cannot reproduce the problem on any other server except this one.
We are very deep inside the OS at present, and are at the level of pipes working unpredictably, but repeatably - an impossibility.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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How strange. Pipes are the core method of interprocess communication under Linux -- in fact, unless they're working properly the system would probably not even boot. I am confused as to how a complicated system like a web server and database-driven web site (I assume this site is database-driven?) could be working properly when the mail system does not!
Is it only web scripts that are having a problem sending email? Or is it the entire system?
David
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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This site is not actually database driven. But elements are. This forum, for example, is. The element that fails is postfix. However it has not been modified, and nor has the OS (we keep MD5 checksums to double check what has been interfered with assuming someone has the time to get around our security).
So we come to the interesting fact that stdin/stdout is broken. This is both th eevidence of our eyes and imposisble both at the same time.
Reinstalling postfix bore no fruit at all. Recompiling it and reinstalling it produced the same outcome.
To us this means that the problem is not in userspace but is far deeper than we are able to go. Th eidentical configuration on a dedicated server, rather than a virtual dedicated server, works perfectl;y.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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I'm sorry to hear about the problem, but at least if you've been able to demonstrate peculiar behaviour it's a step on the way to a solution.
By database-driven I was referring mostly to this forum -- running something on this scale with flat text files would be a total nightmare!
Postfix is usually quite easy to configure -- I migrated a live mail system over to postfix a few months ago, and (touch wood) it's working much more stably than it did under the (admittedly old) version of exim I had been using previously. That said, postfix is a lot more complicated under the hood than it likes to let on in the configuration files.
Personally, I dislike virtual dedicated servers where one has no access to the "host" -- at least if you have a full server you can diagnose a problem right down to the actual hardware. On virtual servers you can never be 100% sure where the problem lies. Virtual dedicated servers also tend to be cheaper and companies that rent them tend to have a large number, so the quality of support is correspondingly reduced. There are places that will rent you a real server for £20-£30 a month.
David
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timmy
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Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
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We have to get the site approved by a host before we can use it. It is controversial in places. It took us a few months to find the current host
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
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