Okay, my gallery setup seems to be randomly deleting galleries. Not deleteing them totally, just removing their listing and giving me that "Attention Administrator" notice.
What I think, or what I suspect is that when I went in to the gallery php
files and put in little if(user==admin) things around some commands, it did
something screwy with the gallery. I honestly cannot fathom WHY that would
it screw it up, but it's the only idea I got. If I were you (or me if you
want me to) I'd head over to the gallery message boards and see if anyone's
ever gotten these specific, cannot move galleries, disappearing errors.
As I type this, I just got a brain flash. I'm 75% positive that the reason
we are getting these errors is because of a server error:
Every once in a while, I'll want to fiddle around with some php coding, test
somehting, or update a page. So I fire up smartFTP and try to upload
something. It tells "There is no space left on the device". Then it takes
the file I was trying to upload, puts it there, but makes it 0 bytes. Now,
to understand the implications of this, you have to understand how galleries
works. I have a rough idea but it's enough:
Instead of an SQL database like the forums, the models, or other upcoming
sections, it uses .dat files! These .dat files are ON THE SERVER. What
this means is:
When a person is trying to upload a photo, or update a caption, or EVEN ADD
A COMMENT (and theorehtically even view a picture!!!!), it writes to the
.dat file! So if the server is pissy, and is in that "No space left on the
device" mood, it's going to set the .dat file equal to 0 bytes. However, I
just checked this, and it's set to 56 bytes for Neo (his was erased again).
So I'm thinking it just screwified it and main it different. Gallery cannot
read that so it doesn't register it as a gallery. THAT is what I think the
problem is now: those "No space left on the device" errors! The reason it
affects a certain person so much is because he has such a big gallery! It's not the
size, it's the fact that he adds to it so much, that people view and leave
comments so much, the chances that someone will have caught the server in a
pissy mood is that much greater.
Does that sound plausible or even correct? Or am I off base here?
Posted: Fri, 2002-12-06 19:42
Posts: 7994
You're right about how Gallery works. The behaviour you're witnessing is consistent with what happens when you run out of disk space. Are you on a shared box which might be running up against the max disk usage on your partition?
At any rate, Gallery is supposed to be good about handling that kind of situation. Even though the primary .dat file gets zero'd out, it should still be able to work off the backup. I know that this doesn't work properly in all cases, but I've been unable to get it to fail in any of my test cases (in the way that it's obviously failing for you). Can you reproduce it? Can you find out if you're really out of disk space?
Posts: 9
Can you reproduce it? Can you find out if you're really out of disk space?
I know we're not out of disk space, it's just a little flutz that happens every now and then with the provider.
I can never reproduce it, but it deleting the largest gallery has happened three times now.