Personally, the snow sprint started off with a bit of a shock. Upon arrival at the location I did two things: try to post a blog entry and check my email. First I find out, that I can’t post any blog entries – plone ignores the changes?! At the same time I got email from three clients who report that they can’t edit any content on their plone sites – which, incidentially, are hosted on the very same machine as this blog…

The symptoms (listed to increase the likelihood of somebody experiencing them finding this entry ;-) were that editing or creating any content object in plone that involved a certain amount of data would fail: either the creation would fail with an error message regarding missing data (a.ka. "Title is required") or the modification would just result in an actually unmodifed object and Plone lying out of its teeth claiming, that all changes had been saved.

Luckily I was in the best possible company imaginable to solve such a problem ;-) Matt a.k.a. Hammertoe was kind enough to help me narrow down the problem. Pretty soon we had isolated it to Apache, rather than Zope or Plone itself. Luckily Matt had encountered a very similar problem and immediately remembered, that it was due to a bug specifically in apache version 2.55. Which made sense, because we upgraded our apache just a few days ago…

Fortunately the bug has already been fixed in the trunk and in the 2.0.x-branch. The remaining problem was then to build the new modules specifically on FreeBSD. For future reference (who knows when that will come in handy!) here are the steps:

• cd /tmp
• svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/branches/2.0.x
• cd /usr/ports/www/apache20
• make clean
• cp /tmp/2.0.x/modules/proxy/* work/httpd-2.0.55/modules/ don’t replace the folder as that would remove the config information – just copy the files from svn into the proxy directory!
• make deinstall ; make reinstall
• sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache.sh restart
• write emails to client informing them, that problem is fixed
• post to tomster.org

Thanks again, Matt for the hand-holding ;-)