Site COMPLETELY DEAD and can't create trouble ticket! WTF?

I have a customer complaining because their website (hosted on WEB129) is suddenly prompting for credentials when they try to view it. I've tried to go into control panel and check permissions to make sure read is enabled for anonymous users, but I get a "System Temporarily Unavailable" custom 500 error from DASP. I can't fill out a trouble ticket either, because when I try to submit it I get the same error. This has happened before where the site suddenly starts asking for a login for no good reason. In the past, I was able to fill out a trouble ticket and it would be resolved. I would like to know why this happens every once in a while though because my customer's patience is starting to wear thin and I'm tired of not having a good explanation for them other than "the hosting service glitched out". What's really frustrating this time is that even the trouble ticket system appears to be broken, so how am I supposed to alert anyone in tech support?!?

 

The support system is working again, so I'll follow up through there. I sure hope they tell me what's causing this. I checked my trouble ticket record and it's the third time this has happened and they've never been able to give me a cause.

 

You can send email directly to the helpdesk (support@), you don't have to use the ticket manager. Though of coursewe recommend that you do, whenever possible. There was no Control Panel outage today, so I'm not sure why you would have had a problem logging in to open a ticket.

As to support not having an answer to the problem with the site, they would not look into the cause if it is related to the application. It is unlikely - not impossible, but very unlikely- that the authentication issuewas caused by something on our end. However the server cannot be the cause in multiple instances. If that were the case, we would see other users on the same server reporting the problem, and the issue would have already been addressed.

Which leads us back to the application or code on the site. And again, if you contact support and say, "These permissions arebroken," they are going to fixthem (unless it is something that they can tell you how tofix yourself). They are not going to look at the code to determine why it happened. Troubleshooting code is outside the scope of the support that we offer.

I don't say that to lay blame, but rather to explain why there is sometimes no answer to the question of whatcauses a certain problem.

 

I can't say why I was getting an error in the control panel either. I definitely was though. Everything worked fine until I hit the submit button to actually submit the ticket, then it blew chunks. But, it went away on its own after a few minutes.

I also realize that the code would usually be the first place to look for other problems. However, the code hasn't changed in quite a long time and I'm not sure how code could cause a basic authentication box to pop up unless I was trying to access a resource that was protected - which I wasn't. The problem actually went away after I restarted the app. I'm not sure how the same page could try to access protected resources before the app is restarted but not after - when no permission settings or code or anything elsewas changed except to restart the app - but I'll look into it. It's almost as if IIS just wigged out and suddenly thought one of my pages was protected even though it wasn't and didn't lose that idea until I jogged its memory by restarting the app. Very odd.

Ialso find it a little strangethat at the same time this was happening, there was anon-reproducableglitch in my control panel which is most definitely not my code. Could just be a slightly glitchy server - we've all seen them before... Two servers, exact same software setup, one works flawlessly, the other has odd glitches for no reason. If that's the case, I guess it'll resolve itself when I migrate to one of the W2K8 servers next month - keeping my fingers crossed.

Thanks for the information regarding the support@ e-mail option. Wasn't sure if that was an unread box just used for sending mail from the ticket system or not. Hopefully my control panel doesn't bug out on me again though. If it does I guess I'll give it a few minutes and try again since that worked this time.

 

Jamie, that's what I was getting at before-- if it was a server problem, we would have the same problem with many customers.


I know of (and have unfortunately worked for) some hosts who just automatically say, "not a server problem," and do whateverthey can to get you to go away and deal with it in whatever way you have to.


I'm happy to say that DiscountASP.NET is not such a company, and when something is misfiring on a server here, several people are interested in finding out why. So we rarely have any long term or unexplainedproblems, and we won't blow you off to cover up problems we don't feel like fixing.


But if moving to IIS 7 puts an end to it, that's great.