Strange footer text strikes again

[Mitch]

Over at my site: http://www.chemicalforums.com/ there is some funky footer text going on. It happened around the same time mediatemple updated their php libraries, I'm not sure if it is related though.

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•†öçËܲÞâ�V.U e¨=�Ô;p\}eG„÷á )íÊJjÙ}žÐ�¸‹èCë5EHò7ˤH=œj€Á Õã¼çÉ} Ìœšmo|*ÿÅŠÒÎì‘w¹ä°{ÊdÁrªøªžë¢V‡¥å¢_¡¾@IV±ó>/-ÒÎ üTàFïQJ׀̀ë§�Ve¯¡¯–ÑÁõ¸}šÚl1ž,ÝV õOÒÏ �iÀÕNÊYÐx͘$e$Ãò±;

[Luke]

Yeah, it's related (again).

Do you still have the patch I sent you the last time it happened?

If not, pm me and I'll send it to you again.

[Lorazz]

i've got the same problem  (http://www.nilenia.de)

[Mitch]

I'm sorry, could you also send it to me again? I can't find it.

[Luke]

You'll find the package attached to this message.

Let me know if it still works.

What's funny on this, is that in the past year I've both recompiled apache a few times, as well as upgraded PHP. However, this problem hasn't occurred here. I'd be interested to know exactly what's going on during the upgrades that's causing this to choke.

[Lorazz]

i'll check it this evening when i'm home from work.

it occured when i was changing from my old rootds to the new rootserver with debian 4.0 and all the latest php and mysql thingies preinstalled. so unfortunately i can' t tell you the responsible update. but it's still a php4 version running.

[Lorazz]

edit: btw i've got a complete german translation for my skin, maybe you have use for it?

[Mitch]

What program can I use to open it?

[darthi8nt]

@mitch
unzip it with winzip then rezip it with winzip.Install it through your package manager as then it will upgrade your database to sphinx 1.1 support.

[Luke]

You should be able to just upload it, and install it. It was made as a direct package for the package manager.

[Lorazz]

it does not help tho

[Luke]

It should.

You uploaded the above package directly to the package manager, and then ran it?


I tested it out locally, as well as on a live site and it worked fine.

[Lorazz]

yes i did, it also tells me that the modification has been installed correctly but it does not show up as installed package and also it still remains in the list as installable modification.

[Oldiesmann]

Tried this on two sites and it didn't work on either one. I first had to remove the 'define(...)' line ("Constant 'DYNSCS' already declared" or something like that), but it still didn't work even after that. I even tried manually deleting those rows and re-inserting them in phpMyAdmin, but that had no effect either.

I forget exactly what I did to fix this issue the last time it happened, but it is annoying.

[Luke]

I'm not sure why it's happening though, but when some hosts have rebuilt PHP, it's killing binary data in the database when it's pulled out. Makes no sense, as I've rebuilt php quite a few times, and not had an issue. Quite strange, for sure.

I'll dig into this as soon as humanly possible, and get it sorted.

[Oldiesmann]

I just moved to a new host with newer versions of PHP and MySQL, but nothing major (old PHP version was 5.2.1, new is 5.2.5; old MySQL was 5.0.39 or something like that, new version is 5.0.45).

[Luke]

That would probably be a problem then.

Let me put something together, and I'll send it to you for testing Mike.

[Oldiesmann]

Would going from a 32-bit kernel to a 64-bit kernel have anything to do with it? That's the only other major difference that I can think of.

[Luke]

It might have an impact, although I can't say for sure Mike.

[Oldiesmann]

Any updates on this? At this point I'm considering making a fresh install of SMF/Sphinx on a test site, then copying the values from there to the other tables.

[Luke]

In all honesty, that would be quickest.

I've been swamped all week, with no real end in sight.

Heh, sleep's overrated.

[juggaloryder]

You know, I just came in to ask about this.  I recently got it on all 3 installs of Sphinx on 1and1 servers.  Is there a way to manually go in an fix it?

[Oldiesmann]

I haven't figured that out yet jugga. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the problem is. I tested out that code using phpDesigner's built-in php installation and it still came out mangled - even if I just encrypted it and attempted to decrypt it.

[Deceipher]

Thank you for the fix provided earlier.
I couldn't find where the dsp() function was declared, this is a way faster (although perhaps not so clean) solution.

[monkeyangst]

I'm getting much the same thing, and I recently switched my PHP installation on my SMF site from 4 to 5... is the issue that the binary data from the database has become corrupt? Is there a way to refresh this data?

[Mitch]

For the past couple months, 3-4, my site is using more and more server processor power from  Media Temple. I can't pinpoint the problem, but if there was some way to disable the need to display the copyright it would help me deduce where this issue is coming from.

[Luke]

As small as the routine that powers that is, I can't imagine that would be it.

I will note though that the GS over there has been less than stellar as a whole for that long, or more.

What's your traffic like? If the scenario that you describe above is correct, your site just may simply be out growing a shared environment like that.

Have you considered one of their VPS options?