blog.philcrissman.com

For some reason, this app stopped working last night. Not sure what happened… it’s possible it had to do with Rails being upgraded to 2.0.2 on Dreamhost’s servers, but now I’m not so sure. I might have been able to fix it just by killing and re-running dispatch.fcgi, which is basically “rebooting” a Rails app on dreamhost.

But, did I do that?

No. I followed some advice and froze Rails in 1.2.6, in case that was the issue. I’m not so sure it was, but in any case, initially doing that did not seem to work.

Then further into the comments on the previously mentioned advice, I saw Yet More Advice to run rm -rf vendor, which I ran without stopping to consider, well, much of anything at all.

Now, I’m a firm believer that one learns either by making ones own mistakes, or by watching other people make mistakes. So hopefully you will learn from mine. Don’t type rm -rf vendor unless you stop to look inside vendor and make sure you don’t want to keep any of it.

vendor, of course, is where plugins and locally stored gems might reside. Fortunately, when I realized this, I just went back to the original mephisto-0.7.3 tarball and recopied the original contents of vendor back to the server. Since then, everything has been fine.

Dreamhost’s support team was a great help, and were quite nice, even when I complained that they were hard to get ahold of — and it turned out that the reason I couldn’t log a ticket on the site was because I was using Firefox 3, which apparently just plain doesn’t render some of the things from their support form. Go figure — beta software that has bugs in it. So, thank you, Dreamhost support team. You are awesome, and if you visit Minneapolis I will still buy you all a coffee. But just one. You will have to share it.