[mv] Does MV degrade over time?

[Sally Boydstun <Truffles@concentric.net>]

******    message to minivend-users from Sally Boydstun <Truffles@concentric.net>     ******

Greeting all!  It's been a long time...

A year and a half ago, with the generous support of this group, I selected
MaxImpact as a host, and spent 6 intensive weeks slapping together a MV
shopping cart (Unix based; v 4.11) and, other than an initial PGP problem
and a occasional permissions fault when I uploaded something (easily
corrected), MV has served my company well.  <Thanks again, Mike!>

Although I planned to upgrade the site this summer while the company is on
shutdown, I haven't altered or uploaded anything at all since last
November.  MV sends me encrypted orders, I roll and dip truffles, and leave
any required maintenance to Mark Williams, the Site Admin at MaxImpact...
and until recently, it has proven a wonderfully symbiotic relationship! :-)
 Needless to say, when the checkout suddenly spazzed out in April and
started telling customers that they needed to validate their CC#, I was
surprised.  When I contacted Mark, and told him about the problem, he sent
me the following message:

At 07:21 PM 4/10/00 +0100, Mark Williams wrote:
> I have looked into this problem and found that minivend cannot find a
specific
> file :-  
>hermes.tees.ac.uk tfNIy74v:152 - [10/April/2000:14:11:37 -0500] 
>FrameCat/cgi-bin/FrameCat/process Encryption error: No such file or directory
>
>Did you make any changes to the cart before this happened? any specific
>information would help in solving this.

I waited a couple weeks and, with my Easter candy season in full swing and
still no word on the problem, emailed him again and got this reply:

At 07:28 PM 4/19/00 +0100, you wrote:
>I've been trying to track down this problem since you first reported it. To
>be honest I have had little success as it seems to be a pretty obscure
>problem. I can well understand your situation and am doing the best I can to
>solve it. I will test a copy of your site on another server to see what
>happens and then track the problem down. rest assured I am doing every thing
>I can to solve this.

After two more weeks, with my Easter season come and gone, and Mother's Day
fast approaching, I contacted him again and pleaded for an update.  I got
this response:

At 12:50 AM 5/2/00 +0100, you wrote:
>I am sorry I have not got back to you earlier on this matter as I have been
>waiting for an e-mail from a consultant regarding your problem. We don't
>have a solution, unfortunetly, as we are still unsure of the circumstances
>for what caused the problem. I have one final thing I can try. But to be
>fair to you I would think about transfering your account to another
>provider. I will e-mail a list of recomended hosts if this final 'throw of
>the dice' does not pay off. You will get the e-mail within 24 hours. I
>apologise for this lack of a resolution to your problem at this time.

So... here are my questions....  

- Since I haven't touched the site since last November, does MV degrade
over time?  
-  If not, what could possibly have caused this problem?  
-  Based on the error message, is this something anyone has experienced, or
is it, 
   as Mark said, "a pretty obscure problem"... 
-  If (as the error msg indicates) MV isn't finding a file, wouldn't
uploading everything 
   again fix it?  Or am I being too simplistic?
-  If I do transfer my account to a different host, won't the problem
remain?  

I'm a one-woman shop and, as both truffle maker and programmer, I won't
have time to do a major overhaul until summer... but if this is a
relatively quick fix, I will gladly make the time.  I have always received
sound and sane advice from this list and, although I would hate to think
I'm having the wool pulled over my eyes by a site host who no longer has
either the time or desire to service my account, if that is what is
happening, I need to know.

TIA for any help/guidance/advice you can offer...


Sally Boydstun
http://www.TruffleLady.com

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