By decibel.places on

I developed a simple D6 site on my dev server

I moved it to my client's Belgacom server and it ain't working, with problems I have never seen before.

The first clue to potential problems is that the UNIX hosting account they sold my client is actually running Linux:

System Linux hostingst505.isp.belgacom.be 2.6.8-3-686-smp #1 SMP Tue Dec 5 23:17:50 UTC 2006 i686

and a pretty old version, as well as still PHP 4 and FastCGI (yes, $base_url is set correctly in settings.php)

I had to make the following comment/edits to .htaccess just to get the site to display:

# Don't show directory listings for URLs which map to a directory.
# Options -Indexes

# Follow symbolic links in this directory.
# Options +FollowSymLinks


# Set the default handler.
# DirectoryIndex index.php, index.htm

Although the server passes the "clean url" test when I enabled clean urls it kept generating the long urls and I had to unset the clean urls manually in the variables table.

The Belgacom account manager referred these issues to the tech team. They did not contact me, but now it is impossible to log in to the site, I submit the log in form (at /?q=user) and it goes to the front page without starting the session or anything.

[note: I looked in the user table and removed the record for uid=0, now I can log in...]

These are all bizarre problems I never encountered before. I offered my own cheap LAMP hosting for $48/year but client already has the Belgacom account.

I do not have access above the web root on the server, no cp, only ftp and a direct url to phpmyadmin. It seems pretty unsuitable for a fix by me. I thought about adding a custom php.ini file in cgi-bin (had to do that once before for FastCGI) but that was on a PHP 5 site, not PHP4.

Also, they set up a "test" subdomain test.domain.com but site is also accessed at www.domain.com when they were changing DNS from the original Windows hosting account. Both still point to the same files, could this be a problem? Without any cp I do not know how they set it up.

When I contact customer service by email, I invariably get an autoresponder "out of office" reply, and cheery replies later on saying they are glad everything is working.

Any ideas?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Aptalops’s picture

Aptalops commented

Hi, I 'googled' Drupal and Belgacom and reached your page.
My experience with Belgacom has been painful on all levels: with the sales team, with the support team, with the DNS team.
If any representatives of that company are reading this and want to challenge my claims, I can back up all with documentation and e-mails.
One moment my site is running well, next, a careless PHP update or change to the server configuration (with no warning) will make it useless. I recently experienced a problem where any time I added a quotation mark (" or ') into a text edit window, on saving it was escaped out using slashes, i.e. remove magic quotes. This happened out of the blue - when I contacted the support team they referred me to the Help files - the "help files" is simply the Parallels control panel User Manual, nothing else - which I had already checked. When I asked for further support they told me that the address I was writing from was not associated with the account, and therefore they could not reply to me.
Today I find that any uploads (images, files, docs) or installation of modules (same thing really) via the CMS is not possible.
I'm not venting anger (well, maybe a little) or asking to take up the community's time in trying to offer advice on how to solve these issues, it's more of a warning: if you're working with Drupal in Belgium, avoid Belgacom hosting at all costs. I'll be asking my client to move their site immediately to a reliable hosting service. If anyone has any recommendations for hosting in Belgium, perhaps you can pass them on.
A~