A question for people who do NOT code in Perl
 

OK, so this question is for people for whom Perl code is just a lump of gibberish on a page:

Imagine you run a hosting company and you have a client who runs several sites across several servers, some using the same Perl script. He contacts you to tell you that the script that has worked fine across several servers for many years has suddenly stopped working on one server. He has tried copying the script directly from the "non-working" server to a working server, and the exact same script works on the other server.

You know nothing about Perl scripts, but you check your servers error logs and find that what he says is true. The code works on most of your servers, but on just one server the script does not work. And on that server the error logs pick out one line and says that there is an error in that line which is causing a time out.

The question is: Can you think of any reason why this might be (remember, you cannot check the validity of the script because you don't code in Perl)? And could you justify assuming that the reason it works on all your servers except one is an error in the script not a problem with your one server that it does not work on?

The reason I ask is that this is what I am being told by the hosting company. I accept that I may make a mistake but I cannot understand how they can think it reasonable to assume this when it works on several of their servers perfectly, and only faults on one. But that is so bazaar a thinking that I want to check it is not me who is mad before I start screaming at them!

It could be a server setting. I know for PHP you can config either to ignore warnings or fail on warnings. Big diff.

Shit, I am too tired to read this post - sorry

That actually makes a lot of sense, but only if they are wrong about which line the error is on. Later LWP has to get a series of URLs, some of which may 404. If it is ignoring the 404 and still waiting for the site to load then that would cause the script to time out.

Have you tried asking the Perl Monks?

Perhaps it is a permissions issue on the new server

Thanks, but I think the problem is with the server, not with the script, so I really need "Server Monks" not "Perl Monks"!

Thanks. Possibly, but there are no problems with other scripts on the same site, so unlikely.