November 28, 2011

Recent Mod Perl Woes

I would imagine that most of you (insofar as there are any of you) who read this most miserable of blogs do so with some kind of feed reader. And as you should: the code running this decrepit site has not been updated in almost five years—an eternity in the Internet era. One problem with running such an old site is that when things break, they break badly. That was precisely what happened this past weekend when what should have been a routine security upgrade of my webserver (Apache) instead took out my whole web presence.

And while I'd like to say I have fixed things, alas it isn't so. I have merely hacked them so that they are again functional; a fix, unfortunately, is still missing. For anyone experiencing issues recently with Apache and mod_perl, I have outlined the issue below. (That past sentence, by the way, should be taken as a sign for most—or all—of you to skip what comes next.)