Strange caching? problem

I got up this morning to discover a strange occurrence on my blog server.

My blog http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/ seems to be serving up a blank page for JUST the landing page.

The admin pages are fine, if I enter the url of an article page it comes back fine. But the base url comes back blank.

Tailing the production log indicates that requests to that url aren't even hitting the rails app. I've swept the page cache using the typo admin ui, I've restarted the blog using cap.

The same thing happens with Safari 4, Firefox, and Curl, so it's not a browser caching issue.

I suspect that Apache and Passenger are not sending the request through, I restarted apache on the server and still the same thing.

Ideas anyone?

The same thing happens with Safari 4, Firefox, and Curl, so it's not a browser caching issue.

I suspect that Apache and Passenger are not sending the request through, I restarted apache on the server and still the same thing.

Ideas anyone?

Not so much an idea as what I would look at next; have you tried using tcpdump (or wireshark, ethereal, etc) to see what the http requests/ responses look like ?

Fred

No. I guess I could set up to do that on the server, but I'm not sure what to look for, I don't know enough about Passenger to know where tcp is used between Apache - Passenger and the rails app, I think that the rails app actually runs in one or more Passenger processes doesn't it?

Did you do a restart, or did you stop httpd and use ps to make sure all threads had exited, then start clean?

If not, I'd try that first.

Tried that, no joy.

Ouch. And you're absolutely sure there's no caching appliance anywhere in the path to your server? Shutting down httpd and sending a request results in a `no connection` message?

Any recent config changes? System auto-updates?

Okay, I discovered that there was an empty file in public/index.html, I renamed it and now the root page is back.

Not sure how it got blank. Looks like a bug in typo.

Nope.

I just posted in reply to my original post that I discovered that there was an empty index.html in the public directory. I got rid of that and the page came back (Typo regenerated it).

So the blog is back but I still don't understand why the cached page got empty.

Actually, I think I figured it out.

A day or so ago, I made a stupid sysop mistake and did a bulk copy which filled up the Logical Volume where the blog is kept. I suspect that Typo tried to refresh that cached file when the disk was full hence the empty file.

If you’re caching the index action using caches_page which produces

an index.html in the public directory, then Typo appears to be overwriting

that version.

-Conrad