Cart not working..................

[Air-Tech]

I've noticed that sales were down over the last 3 days or so, but we did have a few sales so I didn't think there was any issues with the site. However a customer called yesterday to say that he couldn't add more than one item to his cart.

The cart is only allowing one item to be added, any further items being added replace the previous item & so on - it doesn't matter how many items are added, the cart only ever has the last item ordered in it.

I've tried "publish to web" & "refresh" with no change & figured a "Purge & Refresh" was in order, but when this gets to the "Sending base files" an error is being generated (copied below). No work has been carried out on the site recently other than some trivial & simple product additions.

Regarding the error message, there have been no hosting or configuration changes by ourselves & none by our host (that I'm aware about anyway)

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.



Actinic received a server error from the web server. The CGI scripts are not executing properly on the server. The error could be caused by several things. Check:
- the 'Path to the Perl shell'
- the 'CGI script extension'
- the 'Path to CGI-BIN'
- the 'CGI-BIN URL.
- the amount of web space left on your server
- if your server is configured to accept POSTs to CGI scripts
- the permissions on the server:

On Linux/Unix based servers the permissions should be:
cgi-bin (755) – drwxr-xr-x
Online Store Folder (777) – drwxrwxrwx
On Windows based servers (need to be checked with the hosting company):
IIS
cgi-bin = read/execute
Online Store Folder = read/write/execute
NTFS
cgi-bin = Catalog's FTP account needs 'Change' permissions on the directory
Online Store Folder = Catalog's FTP account needs 'Change' permissions on the directory AND the IUSR_<servername> account needs to have 'Change' permissions on the directory

Run Web | Configure Web Site Details... to review your web site configuration.

[Steve G Griggs]

Sounds like permissions have may have been changed on the CGI bin. Can you access and check/change the settings to see if they are correct?
Might be worth contacting your web hosting company to see if they have made any changes, or migrated you to a new server?
We had some similar issues when our host migrated our site to a new server.

[Air-Tech]

Thanks for your reply.

I've tried contacting my host's "24 hour" support, but it seems that the out of hours support team only have limited access / knwowledge.....

I FTP'd into the site and found the permissions to be CGI-BIN - 0775 & store also 0775, according to the suggested settings, the store folder should be 0777 - I changed this, but it had no effect, so reverted back to 0775.

Looking through the error logs, there are a number of recent SHOPCART errors which all state dd000001.pm did not return a true value at (eval 34) line 1, I've had a look at dd000001.pm via FTP, but it seems to be an empty file, unlike most of the files in the cgi-bin?

Publish, refresh & purge won't complete now, either stating FTP Error changing directory to /. , or stating similar script / cgi error as previously & it now seems that any attempt to add anything to the cart results in a general script error stating again Error: Error loading digital download module. dd000001.pm did not return a true value at (eval 34) line 1.

Is it possible to replace dd000001.pm on the server via FTP, or am I barking up the wrong tree?


Thanks again.

[NormanRouxel]

Try running the Network Test. If that's OK then you could try Refreshing the site.

If these don't pan out, it may be best to wait till you can find an informed person at your server support. They may have changed something without warning.

A possible culprit would be the version of Perl. See http://community.actinic.com/archive...p/t-44811.html for an earlier similar problem.

[Air-Tech]

Norman - I've had a look & it's currently at 5.8.8 which I believe is OK.

As you suggest, I think I'll have to wait until I can get hold of someone who knows what they are talking about - I don't even have any content loading when I browse to my site now, just a blank page.


Thanks.


It's all been stupendously good for weekend sales..............

[Air-Tech]

Resolved

Apparently the server we were on ran out of space - anyway our site has now been uploaded / tested & everything is back to normal

Does this suggest something about the quality of the hosting that I'm using, or is it just one of these things that can happen?



Thanks all!

[cbarling]

I think that it suggests something about the quality of hosting.

An example of what we do pro-actively with Actinic hosting is that we monitor the length of email queues. So if someone is suffering an attack where a spammer is misusing their site, we generally pick it up before their disk space has filled up and the entire site fails. We also monitor continuously all servers from both within and outside the firewall, and quite a few other checks. For instance, the system emails you if you're running out of disk space.

I'm sure other good quality hosts do similar things. With hosting, you generally get what you pay for. You can go years with low cost hosting without getting a problem, but when you do eventually hit a road block it generally takes some time to sort out.

I guess the approach that each merchant takes depending largely on their experience and the cost of outages. On the other hand we've seen quite a few people see their sales rise after they moved to Actinic hosting, presumably because in those cases the service was a lot faster.

Chris