invalid attachment problem

[Macsee]

I could create one in the next day or two and give you private access if you want.

[Lynne]

I would set up a test site and see if you can reproduce the issue there. Then see if disabling all your modifications will 'fix' the issue.

[Macsee]

Originally Posted by Lynne

Do you have a test site - a duplicate of your live site? It may be easier to do these sort of tests on a test site and be able to leave the live site alone.

As I said, I'm happy to create a test site for you to try out if you want.

Otherwise I don't get your suggestion. You seem to be suggesting that I create a test site to test this attachment problem, but I'm unable to see how testing on a test site is going to unearth something I haven't found by testing on the live site (which I've already done). Am I missing something?

I have tried turning off the modifications this morning and trying out some attachments. I get the same problem.

I'm beginning to suspect it's a vBulletin problem rather than one of my making.

[Lynne]

OK, you may do tests on the live site.

I would suggest reuploading ALL totally default files for your site (important!), removing any files that are unused (very important!), setting your site to use a totally default style, and disabling all your modifications. Run your site like this for a few days. I thought that would be easier for you on a test site than on a live site.

[Macsee]

Yes, such drastic action would hamper the smooth operation of the forum and would need to be done on a test site rather than the live one.

It is a fair amount of work and time commitment though. If I knew for sure this would solve the problem I would do it. However, considering that the problem is more deep rooted and possibly even a vB problem rather a Macsee one, I could end up sinking a lot of time and energy into chasing shadows.

I'm going to give up at this point. Thanks for all your assistance.

[Simon Lloyd]

Maybe you have a messed up .htaccess file or hotlink protection in cpanel is messed up.

[Lynne]

I really don't think it is a vB problem because you would be hearing a LOT of admins complaining about this happening on their site if it was a vB problem. As it is, I've only heard of this happening on a couple of sites and they all had modifications on them (and I think they were also on shared hosting).

[Macsee]

Simon, that's a thought, but wouldn't a messed up htaccess affect all attachments including all that I, the admin, make? There is no cPanel on my server. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Lynne, I have seen a fair few complaints here, elsewhere and in vbulletin.com (in fact, one of their developers' attachments - posted in a thread about missing attachments, ironically - went walkabouts). I didn't save all the URLs but there were several.

Incidentally, I'm not on a shared host, it's a dedicated Linux/Apache box (and, yes, without cP). I've disabled EasyForms now and have only GlowHost and ThankYou. I dislike modding for precisely this reason - muddying the waters when it comes to troubleshooting - so no custom mods, not even our own skin. We use default vB.

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by Macsee

Simon, that's a thought, but wouldn't a messed up htaccess affect all attachments including all that I, the admin, make? There is no cPanel on my server. Thanks for the suggestion though....

No it wouldn't, here's a section that allows only certain domains to see or link to pictures

#RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.thecodecage.com/.*$      [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.thecodecage.com$      [NC]
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.thecodecage.com/forumz/.*$      [NC]
#RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.thecodecage.com/forumz$      [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC]

take a look in your .htaccess for something like this and see what's lurking there, other than server settings this is the only reason i can see for an upload to not complete!

[kh99]

I think Lynne was hinting at this before, but anyway - the cleanup2 scheduled task removes any entries from the attachment table that are older than 1 hour and have contentid = 0. So the fact that you saw the record had contentid=0 seems to be the problem. In includes/class_dm_threadpost.php around line 526 is this code:

PHP Code:

        if ($this->info['posthash'] AND $this->fetch_field('attach') AND $postid)
        {
            $this->dbobject->query_write("
                UPDATE " . TABLE_PREFIX . "attachment
                SET
                    contentid = $postid,
                    posthash = ''
                WHERE
                    posthash = '" . $this->dbobject->escape_string($this->info['posthash']) . "'
                        AND
                    userid = " . intval($this->fetch_field('userid', 'post')) . "
            ");
        } 


That's suppose to be executed at the same time that the post is posted, to set the content id to the postid and to erase the posthash. It might be interesting to know if that's getting executed (when someone posts with an attachment), and if not, why not (which part of the condition is false). Since you have full access to your server you could do something like put in some code to open a debug file and write out some info (which is how I do a lot of debugging).