Problem Publishing To New Server

[clefty]

Ah ha! Please tell me more. Is this something that our hosting company can check, and, if necessary, amend?

Most FTP programs have two options for uploading, ASCII (text) and BINARY. Binary is for uploading GIFs, JPEGs, and anything that is not text. Use ASCII mode for uploading HTML fies and Perl files. (HTML can be uploaded in either mode, but it is best to use text mode).

The reason why you must use text mode is that Unix interprets the end of line character differently from DOS and Mac. When you use text mode in your FTP program, it takes care of translating the end of line characters for you. If you don't do this, your Perl script will not execute and you will get errors.

All this is handled during the ftp upload, so your Perl scripts shouldn't contain any Windows characters.

I think the best thing is to ask your host to upload a copy of a "Hello World" script themselves, via FTP (not by direct local access to disk at their end) and see if they get the same mangled upload that both Actinic on your machine and an upload by Actinic tech support (who I'm fairly confident can write, save and upload a pl script using the correct mode )

As Malcolm says, don't spend any more time at your end playing with the scripts - I don't think it's an issue at your end.

[RuralWeb]

My advice is to move hosts as the problem is not at Actinics end.

[Craig Walsh]

Don't Want to Change Either

Wow, thank you all for the information and advice. I have relayed this back to HostMySite and await further word from them. As our e-commerce site is up and running, the urgency is (thankfully) removed.

I don't want to change our hosting company or our e-commerce software provider. We have about a dozen websites running on the dedicated server --- at least three Coppermine photo galleries, five Article Manager content management sites, several forums --- and even some bespoke sites. I have found the 24/7 live support that I get from HostMySite to be, for the most part, wonderful.

I am reminded of a Compaq workstation that we bought for my wife about six or seven years ago, when we lived in the States. We bought it from CDW, so it was supported by them. We also paid for on-site support by Compaq.

The new workstation would not shut down. It was like a zombie. It just refused to shut down, no matter what (except, of course, for unplugging it). We called CDW a bunch of times and spoke with their Microsoft "gold" support engineers. They did three-way conference calls with Compaq. We uninstalled and re-installed almost everything, but nothing seemed to fix the problem.

Finally CDW recommended that we have a Compaq engineer come out on site. Another conference call, but this time to the guy who simply schedules the visits. "What's the problem, sir?" he asked. "The computer won't shut down," I replied.

"Oh, I had that problem with my computer at home. Here's how I fixed it." And he told me. It took two seconds: I had to change a 0 to a 1 somewhere. And all the Microsoft "gold" engineers had missed this.

I'll let you know what happens after HostMySite looks at the FTP protocol on the server.

Thanks again for your help.