Hi friends, today our beloved   site seems to have some problems:

- The ping is too much high from here, about 600 ms compared to the usual 200 ms

- The thumbnail generator of the album began to build the thumbnail without enough permissions: usually it generates the thums with the 644 permission (the file can be read by all) and now it generates the thumbs with the 600 permission (the file can be read only by the owner). Actually I'm changing manually the permission,  so if you don't see the thumbnail of your picture it will be shown soon...

I've already sent a post to the support system at godaddy and I'm waiting for the reply, hoping that it's only a temporary thing and that I'll not have to change hosting company again       ....

Sorry for the inconvenience...  

It looks like a server problem. You send a e-mail to them and the only think what we can do now is wait for theirs reply!      

Yep !       Anyway I'm really upset... I hope that it's not come the time to change provider again       ...

I noticed the thumbnail problem when I uploaded the "Lost" installment of the story.  I didn't say anything at the time, because, I thought that the all black image was a borderline situation that the software didn't know how to handle.

By the way, the permission setting of 644 provides read and write permission to the file owner, read permission to the group and read permission to other (aka world readable).  While a 600  setting permits read and write access by the file owner and no access to anyone else except by root.

Have you verified that the part of the program that generates thumbnails has not been modified?  Also the mask setting for the user under which the sites code runs can casue this problem.  This is being run on a Windows based server, so the following will depend on how well it is simulating a unix environment.

Do you have shell access as that user that the site runs as?  If so you can verify the mask setting by entering this command "umask".  executing that command, you should see 0022.  If you instead see somthing more like 0066, or 0177, then the problem is that the default umask setting has been altered.

Either way, the source of the code handling the thumbnail generation should be able to be modified to explicitly set the file permissions for the generated files to 644, reguardless of the umask setting.

Pangor

I've not much access to the server, only ftp, change permissions and create databases.

The thumbnails are created by GD as far as I know, the album upload the pictures in a temporary directory, then it change their name and move them to the proper category folder chmodding them, but ther is not a chmod command for the thumbnail, so I think that all is done directly by GD and its settings, the program pass to GD the picture and GD saves it.

Nothing has been changed so I assume that something on the server has changed... Anyway I'll wait for the reply... The only information I can give you is a phpinfo...

In that case, disreguard what I said.  There are no unix style permission handling on that host, what you see with ftp is a simulation of the unix style permission withing the their ftp server code, the settings are then mapped to how ever they have set up the Windows box to operate.

Pangor

All is back to normal now   !

The support service contacted me and here is their mail, I replied that there are no more problems   :


Dear Davide Clerici,

Thank you for contacting customer support. We are currently experiencing some issues with our Linux 214 and 216 servers. We are working to restore proper functionality as soon as possible.

To assist us in pinpointing the cause of this issue we will need you to provide us with some information called a ‘Trace Route'. If you are using a Windows based PC just follow these steps to get the needed results:

1. Go to your Start Menu, go to ‘Programs', then to ‘Accessories'.
2. Here you will find either ‘MS-DOS Prompt' or ‘Command Prompt'.
3. Click on that program and a window should appear with something similar to the following:

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600]
(C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.

c:windows>

In this screen type:

tracert yourdomainname.com (without the quotations and replacing yourdomainname.com with the name of your domain).

After typing this press enter, you will get back a long list of information, after it is completed (it will return to the original prompt you started with) we will need you to copy and paste these results back to us.

To do this just right click on the menu bar of this window and go down to ‘Properties' in the shortcut menu. In this screen there should be an option available for ‘QuickEdit Mode'. Just select this option and click ‘OK', you may be asked if you want to use these settings for just this window or to append the shortcut. Either answer will be fine. This will return you to the command prompt window. Just click and drag your curser over the text from the trace route, this should highlight it white. Once you have it all highlighted just remove your finger from the mouse button and the information will be copied. You will then be able to paste the information in your email response.

We understand that this is quite a few steps but this will allow us to further research the problem you are experiencing. We appreciate your patience and assistance in tracking down the source of this problem.

Please let us know if we can help you in any other way

          
 

Pangor