From the daily archives:

Saturday, September 1, 2007

This blog is hosted on a Site5 server, and earlier today suffered a major outage when the shared host it sits on had a severe hardware problem.

Thankfully, that problem was rectified with the technical team’s usual good speed. Everybody’s home directories had to be restored from an earlier backup, but this blog is so low usage these days that it wasn’t really affected.

The only that troubled me was that, as soon as it was back online, my Mint installation, which collates web statistics locally, was failing to register any page impressions. I also have web bugs installed for Sitemeter and Google Analytics — yes, three is overkill for a small blog, but it helps me field test changes on a site that doesn’t matter before I do anything too meddlesome on commercial sites that do — but those were still picking up page impressions.

Safari’s useful (but often ignored) Activity window showed that Mint’s web bug was returning a response of ‘unacceptable’ — double-clicking the request’s line in the Activity window passed me through to a standard window showing that the full response was a 406 Not Acceptable error.

A quick google, and I found this thread on the Mint forums, which provided the solution of adding the following lines to the Mint directory’s .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
 SecFilterEngine Off
 SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

which did the trick.

I’m not sure why I need that fix now, when before the failure I didn’t, but I’m at least relieved I found it. And I’m mainly blogging here to increase the chances of anybody suffering the same fate easily finding the same fix.

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Lessons learned

September 1, 2007

Over the past week, I’ve been representing The Stage at two press conferences that Matt, our broadcasting correspondent, would normally have gone to had he not been moving house this week.

The two events (the launch of the Eurovision Dance Contest on Tuesday at City Hall, and of High School Musical 2 on Friday at the […]