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Links 2.0 has stopped working

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Links 2.0 has stopped working
I'm baffled. Links 2.0 worked fine for the past few weeks. I ran the admin from the Web, but have the ability to telnet in and run it from the command line.

The script has stopped working. When I try to Validate, Build or Stagger, the script seems to start, then freezes. When I run nph-build.cgi from the command line, it gets as far as "Building URL Index ..." then freezes. I checked my http error-log, and the script is not generating any errors. It's simply stopping.

The Validate script also freezes, though I've only tried to run this one from the Web.

Does anyone have any ideas? Why the script would run fine for several weeks, then suddenly stop working?

David

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http://www.nodeadtrees.com/
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Re: Links 2.0 has stopped working In reply to
Are you sure it stopped working, or just has slowed down? It can get painfully slow if you have a lot of links, or a lot of links in any one category.

What ISP are you on -- maybe they changed something.
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Re: Links 2.0 has stopped working In reply to
Thanks, Pugdog.
I'm on my own server, a PII with Solaris. I've waited as long as ten minutes for the script to move beyond "Building URL Index...", and it hasn't budged.

I just kicked it off again to see if it will work. It doesn't seem to do anything.

David

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http://www.nodeadtrees.com/
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Re: Links 2.0 has stopped working In reply to
Well, if you didn't change anything, this shouldn't be happening Smile

Try building staggered and see how far you get...

You might also want to try re-installing links, in a different directory and see if that works.

Without any error messages, it's hard to tell.

The only thing you can do is to put print statements into the code and see where it starts to hang up.

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Re: Links 2.0 has stopped working In reply to
I'm unfamiliar with the Print command, and how to insert it into the code. Any help there would be *much* appreciated.

I have found a couple of other interesting things: nph-verify.cgi still works; any of the other scripts that call either database or nph-build.cgi freeze part way through from either the command line or Web interface; no error messages of any kind -- either in the error_log or on the screen -- are generated. In the Web interface, it just stops working.

If I reinstall the script, will I lose the existing links? There are only 200 of them, but each is precious.

I do run a few other cgi scripts on the server, and I've checked them. They run, so it's not an overall Perl failure.

Any help is much appreciated.

David

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http://www.nodeadtrees.com/
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Re: Links 2.0 has stopped working In reply to
Links 2.0 is really easy to reinstall...
Copy the *.cfg files and *.def files and the stuff in the DATA directory. (Make a back up).

Reinstall links, and then copy those files over their counterparts.

All the information telling links what to do and how to act is in the 3 config files in the admin directory, and the data in the *.db files in the 'data' directory. The two .txt files in the 'data' directory store the pointers to the next available ID.

Possibly the easiest thing to do is copy the nph_build.cgi from the distribution back over the current one and see if for some reason that got corrupted.

Make a backup of your current nph_build.cgi if you have made any changes to it so you have a guide of what to do to modify the new one, and do it step by step until it breaks <G>

you can just use a

print "this linke of text will show up somewhere ... \n";

inside routines called from the 'admin.cgi' script, since it has already sent a response header back to the browser to expect text back. The messages should show up in the message window between the Links notification messages.

Don't forget at least one '\n' to make the output more readable.

Hope this helps.