Locked Out

What a nightmare I've had with this website for the last week.

Last Saturday I was unable to log in to MT with an error saying my account had been suspended. I emailed the hosting providers and was told "Sorry, we forgot to update the repayment date." Okay, everything worked for an hour or so and I got the same error again. When I checked my cgi-bin I found that the mt folder had been renamed to mt-overloading-script.

I changed the name back to mt.

Later I had problems logging in again, and after checking, found that the folder had been renamed to mt-overloading-script again. This time when I renamed it, I couldn't log in to MT and this time got an "HTTP Error 406 - Not acceptable". I thought they'd disabled scripts on the site because I couldn't get any of the cgi scripts to work.

Mind you, this was going on day to day. It took that long to get a response from the hosting providers after each email I sent them.

Then I got an email saying:

No mention of which particular script they were referring to, so I trawled through all the server logs on the cPanel, and decided it was a script called mt-mail-entry.cgi that was causing all the problems. The mt-comments and mt-tb scripts also seemed to be working over-time. I deleted and renamed these scripts and still couldn't log in to MT. Still getting the 406 Error. I wrote them another email, asking if they had disabled scripts and got no reply. The next day I emailed a slightly nicer email and was told my request would have to be routed to their technician. That was Thursday, and I still have had no response.

In the meantime, I signed up for hosting on another site, moved over all my files, which took nearly 2 days of downloading and then uploading. And I had the exact same problem on the new server. The 406 Error again. I've spent the day reading all about CGI script errors, premature end of headers, and anything else I could think of.

I added these two lines to the mt.cgi script

use CGI::Carp qw/fatalsToBrowser/; 
print "Content-type: text/html\r\n\r\n"; 

And got the following error message:

Can't locate MT/Object.pm in @INC (@INC contains: 
lib /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.7/i686-linux /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.7 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/i686-linux /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.5 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.2 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.1 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.0 
/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl .) at lib/MT.pm line 18.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at lib/MT.pm line 18.
Compilation failed in require at lib/MT/Bootstrap.pm line 4.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at lib/MT/Bootstrap.pm line 4.
Compilation failed in require at mt.cgi line 12.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at mt.cgi line 12.

My last resort was to upload everything fresh from the 3.33 upgrade folder to the MT library. And, thankyou God, everything was working again.

I guess I have the so called "web spammers" to thank for all my problems. It cost me $130 and two day and I could have overwritten the library files on the old server. Too late now. I'm hoping the old hosts will refund my money since I no longer require hosting with them. Not their fault, I know, so if they say no, then I'll have to use it for something else. It's unlimited space and bandwidth for only $66 AU a year, so the value was good. But you get what you pay for. These guys didn't notify of the problem, didn't know which files were causing it, and were slow to respond to emails. I asked for my money back in one email and am still waiting for a response about that. When next I ask, I'll use a subtler approach.