I knew my upgrade to CS 2.0 on my web host provider
WebHost4Life wasn't going to be problem free, since, let's face it, the mass of files comprising CS 2.0 is downright huge. (Reminds me of a guy I know who's like 120 pounds and his wife is around 300 pounds. I feel like that guy when I'm upgrading CS, but hey, I love every pound of her.) As part of the fun I was moving from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0, too, so the stage was set for fun a-plenty.
Everything went beautifully until that wrench outta nowhere nailed the side of my head from ReverseDOS's direction just when I thought I was done with the upgrade. It still smarts a bit, too, which is why you'll find a tried-and-true CAPTCHA control on my CS 2.0 comment form.
ReverseDOS is a Comment and Referral Spam control package that several CS guys who I admire a lot swear by. So with CS 2.0 I thought I would do what the Coolsters were doing and would consider life without CAPTCHA.
After about an hour of deleting my old site directories and uploading my new site I fired up my new site. Sweeeeeeeeet! (Man, who's that handsome, posterized guy on the home page of that blog!)
Not done yet though. Time to login, turn off a few CS applications and other necessities to finish the job.
WHAT TH'... I CAN'T LOGIN TO MY BLOG!
Tell me, how in the HECK do I track that one down??? And in IE, all I got was a blank page when I tried to login. I didn't have any View Source to work with, and there were no errors recorded in my cs_exceptions table. I was screwed.
There are three issues you automatically consider with a CS upgrade problem when everything is perfect on the development server: 1) Permissions, authentication or configuration issues on the remote host server (Whatdaya MEAN I can't run IIS and see how my Application Pool is configured???), 2) I somehow missed uploading some files, or 3) with all of the UrlRewriting in the CS Core maybe my single blog configuration was screwed up. But it looked like an XML issue. Unfortunately, there's XML everywhere in CS, even in SQL tables, so Lord knows where this missing "XML element" was supposed to be located.
I knew the site was complete and configured correctly. I knew the site was clean from any CS 1.1 files before I moved to CS 2.0. Checking everything for possible clues. Then on top of that, WebHost4Life decides to have SQL Server problems (I knew because I had another WH4L site down for about an hour, too), so my investigation was stalled.
I then decided to take a reductionist route and started getting rid of stuff. Kinda like back in the early 90's when a computer wouldn't boot up, you yank the video card or a RAM SIMM. So I got rid of the custom CSModule I wrote. That wasn't it. Now it was ReverseDOS's turn to go.
I removed the ReverseDOS DLL from the \bin directory, the httpmodule listing from the web.config and removed the reverseDOS.config from the root. Dang if that wasn't the problem. I was able to login some four hours after the moment I thought I was done with my upgrade.
That was when I added my CS 2.0 CAPTCHA mod.
For you ReverseDOS fans, I'm sure I followed the installation instructions correctly. I used the default .config file. I have no virtual directories on my site, so I didn't put it in any subdirectories. The thing is, it was working perfectly on my development server, so I don't know. All I know is that my upgrade could have gone a lot smoother than it did and somebody has to take the fall.
[tags: Community Server, ReverseDOS]