New version of Perl and MT don’t want to play, MT blogs returning 500 errors
Six Apart’s Movable Type is sick and the new Perl modules are apparently to blame, according to reports emerging all over the place from MT users who can still get something published using MT.
The conflicting Perl modules are apparently part of the latest cPanel update.
To Six Apart’s credit, Anil Dash has posted about the problem here, although it’s not clear to me at this stage where they are at with overcoming the problem.
Sillicon Valley Watcher, who are also having problems with MT as well, suggests that tens of thousands of Six Apart customers have been affected, and that the problems may see more users make the switch to the open source WordPress.
Thank you Duncan. I almost purchased a 10 user MT license earlier today. Maybe I’ll stick with WordPress a while longer.
6A’s engineers helped to troubleshoot a problem with a buggy perl module, i.e. it wasn’t specifically 6A’s fault.
I find it funny though, that you post about problems with MT but not a peep about the new 3.2 features!
I was on the point of moving to Typepad. I think I’ll hang fire for a bit.
Arvind,
mainly because I don’t want to pay to try them out, as more is said though I will take a look at what other people are saying and give them some coverage. Interestingly though where as a feature release like this would have had many people talking there isn’t a lot of people, at least in my main blog circle talking about them, because many have gone to WordPress or other blogware, where as 18 months ago we’d all be talking about it, but then again we’re not making as much money as Mena so I guess we must be wrong…..
In your eagerness to attack Mena, you seemed to have forgotten there’s a fully functional free version available!
Also when are you going to grow up and give your attacks a rest. It really affects the credibility of your site, which otherwise provides excellent blog news coverage. I personally find your attacks quite amusing because they are so lame but that’s just me!
John, to be clear, we control TypePad’s hosting at Six Apart, so these sorts of issues don’t crop up as they do with Movable Type, which runs on thousands of different server configurations.
To make the error a little more clear, what happened is a MySQL driver was updated on CPAN that had a bug in it. CPanel automatically sent out the CPAN update that included the driver, and a small but significant number of Movable Type users who run the application on hosts that use CPanel were affected with intermittent errors. As of tonight, the issue should be resolved for all users with the fixed driver being updated automatically.
As I’m sure you’ll agree, Duncan, MT’s a good choice for business users who want professional support from a company that they can hold accountable, so i appreciate the credit for us communicating up to your expectations about the issue.
Anil
I may dislike your boss but I still try to be fair, and yes, although I may disagree with some of things you’ve done from my perspective there is little doubt that you’ve achieved your goals in terms of your target market, and credit where credit is due, if you looked at the business only market I’m guessing SA would hold 50, maybe 60% of it due to the support model, its just ashame from my perspective that you couldn’t open source MT and sold support like say Red Hat does, lets face it, you guys are half way there, and it wouldn’t be a big step, given that I’m guessing TypePad is where the vast majority of your revenue is coming from. Imagine Open Sourcing MT and all the support and extra hands helping you’d get, you guys could use the script to make TypePad better again!
Anyhow, nice to see you back here at the Herald, even if I’m not on the SixApart Christmas card list :-)
Anil, thanks for the tip. I’ll certainly be using Typepad for my new project when it rolls out.
Arvind, lame is your opinion but I don’t remember you being around when MT 3 came around so perhaps you weren’t in my shoes and many other MT users shoes. Basically we thought that the licensing for MT 3 was an insult to all those that gave a huge amount of support, whether that be through blogging, or plugins, or support etc…and to this day I still believe it was. The fact that it took the 3 turns to supposedly get it right says it all to me, but in my books I was lost at the first effort. Sure, the third revision (the final revision) was better in terms of the licensing, but the faith had been lost. I’ve always been conscious of the fact that my stance has pissed of the remaining MT die-hards, and honestly I don’t like pissing anyone off. But to not be honest on my thoughts would mean selling out this site, and I’d rather lose traffic than sell my sole to someone or something I didn’t believe in. After all, isn’t blogging about being honest? I do hope that you can see past my anti-SA stance and enjoy the mix of blog news here. This blog has always meant to provide a mixed and comprehensive update of blog news, no matter what your views. Perhaps one day we can sit down and debate this in person? I’d like nothing more, and I’ll keep saving for that big trip to the US I’ve been planning for the last two years. We’ll have to catch up.