In my (limited) spare time, I sometimes sell my soul to whoever
pays me (read: I program for people who'd like to pay me ;-).
Since my time is very limited lately, I now keep it to a bare minimum,
yet every now and then I still hack up some Perl scripts for someone
else.
Sometimes these people ask me to install whatever I have made, and usually,
I have no problems with doing that. Yesterday, however, I ran into
a little dispute with a certain rather big webhoster, or better, with
the hellhelpdesk of it.
My script seemed to die and I couldn't really see why (the code worked
fine on my server), yet luckily, the FTP credentials I received, also
worked for a SSH connection (making life so much easier).
Running the script from the command line went fine, so I went looking for
the Apache error log files. Most webhosts I have seen, seem to think it's
evil to present the files to you, so they hide them somewhere in a dark
corner of the server.
"This must be a FAQ", I thought, so I went to crawl on the webhost's
website. After several minutes of digging through the "documentation",
I gave up and hit the "Live Help" button.
After typing the user name (of my "employer"), a flashy window popped up
and a nice gentleman asked me how he could help me. I explained to him
that I'd like to see the error_logs, for I had no clue why my scripts
weren't working. He would put the IIS error log files
in "my" root directory. I explained him that I really doubted the server I was
on was running IIS, and he promptly corrected himself by saying he would
put the Apache logfiles in the root directory.
No clue where they were before my request, yet after a little while, I
indeed saw the file error_log in /home/ (so not the root...).
Quickly after I spotted the error! My .htaccess file, with some
URL rewrites, didn't work.
[Tue Mar 07 02:07:23 2006] [alert] [client 82.93.15.120] /path/to/.htaccess: Invalid command 'RewriteEngine', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
So, back to the friendly live help guy! He assured me, however, this was
a "coding error" and they didn't support coding errors. I can see
there point, yet I can also see this error has close to nothing to do
with my script/coding. I asked him friendly to solve this (by installing
or enabling mod_rewrite on the server), yet he didn't move from his
diagnosis: coding error.
I worked around it by using a ErrorDocument 404 setting, yet it's
ugly.
Why, oh why didn't he just say: "Sorry, but mod_rewrite is not
supported" ?
I hate it when I know more about something, than the guy who's supposed
to help me (luckily, that barely happens ;-)
