I found a bug in the links script and was wondering if anyone else had this problem and what to do about it. When I add new links to the database, I go to the category and click on the link and I get an error message which reads:

Error: No record specified or record not found (1154)!

When I go back an hit 'build pages' it fixes the problem but then later on when I add more links, another link will not work anymore and have the same error message. Very weird.

Any ideas or does anyone know why this happens and what the hack is to fix this bug?

Thanks in advance.

Funkmaster Huge

Yep... I've got the problem too!

I tried submitting this same question... and to no avail.. I am still unanswered as to why?!?!

I'm considering getting rid of the hit update... because I believe that is when it is killing the database link.

Have you seen a pattern?

:MK

Have you guys tried "Chack Cat." function under "Categories" section in Links Manager - Administration?
What I think is that you got a link that does not belong in any category. May be illegal characters in the link? But I might be wrong.

Pasha

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-[ It's just another night; good morning Webmasters! ]-

Pasha,

Actually... I've tried everything there is... and it still does it.

It does it on it's own... hours after building the pages. I can't figure it out. I've gone down the links database... a tedious job with several hundred entries, and can't see any invalid entries as well.

It's random... when it does it... the whole thing pretty much sucks wind.

I have the board installed in another section... same thing happens there, with different data!

Thanks for your thoughts!

Marty

I had the problem on a Links 1.11 installation a while back. My problem was caused by a link that was, for lack of a better term, corrupted.

This is what happened: someone modified their link within the database... twice. I just assumed that all I needed to do was delete one and verify the other. When I did this, it doubled everything on the line with that particular link. It is actually hard to explain unless you actually saw the database entry. I had to open my links.db file within Excel and manually correct the problem and then re-upload the file to my server. After doing this, it cleared up my problem.

Well... the way I found to fix this problem... get rid of the jump url feature... which disables hit counting... and have the links jump directly to the site's URL.

The problem happens somewhere in the jump routine (JUMP.CGI), and is probably caused by either a slow server, or a faulty file locking process (per Alex).

So... if you would like the code I used... shout!

webmaster@racepages.com

Well, so far I am still getting this wierd error. When it affects my database, some of the links work and others have that error message.

I would like to continue to use the 'Jump' feature on my site, so is there a modification to the script to make this error go away? I have gone through my links.db and cleaned up any bad links and so I guess that's the first step.

Thanks in advance.

Personally, I would look to your database as the culprit here. Somehow or another, it is corrupted. Maybe just a few records. Bring the records up in the View screen and look them over for odd looking things, especially dates that may not have 4-digit years, or fields that are blank that should not be, or data from one field appearing in another. Another thing to look for is records with a multiple ID that looks like: "13|14|15" or "13|13|13". If you don't fix it now, it will just continue to get worse. I doubt, very much, if the problem is with the script itself.

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Bob Connors
bobsie@orphanage.com
www.orphanage.com/goodstuff/

Ok, I will view the links.db and go through it with a fine tooth comb looking for errors...( 'sigh', just 2,800 links ).

I was thinking also that it might be an illegal character in the database. I have the addon feature that allows special characters, but is there any other rare characters that cause wierd behavior in the script?

Thanks for the tips.

Huge

I'm having the same problem. So I went through my links.db and found several HUNDRED entries that look like this:

1003|Pioneeer Pilot, Walter E. Lees|http://home.earthlink.net/~ralphcooper/index.htm|19-Apr-1998|Historical|A personal account of the early years of ``aviation, based on the collection of ``Walter E. Lees, Pioneer Pilot & Early Bird|Ralph S. Cooper, D.V.M.|ralphcooper@earthlink.net|4|No|No

I'm curious about the `` that appear in the middle of the description. Does this appear to be a corrupted entry?

Also, I have found some foreign characters in some of the entries, but I do not have the mod for foreign characters installed, could this also be corrupting my database?

Jack

This has been a problem on some systems and seems to be how they implement flock(). The file locking implemented by perl isn't as reliable as it should be, and the url.db file get's corrupted. This results in all calls to jump.cgi failing until the database is rebuilt.

Links 2.0 handles this much better in that the worst that can happen is a link will lose the number of hits it got since the last build.

Again, it's pretty rare (I've had maybe 6 users complain in a year and a half and thousands of downloads). Your best bet would be to switch to v2 (although I know you've done a ton of mods, so you might just want to see if you can use versions 2.0 jump.cgi and the new build parts).

Cheers,

Alex

I am still getting the error message every few days with the links database. Did removing all the '' characters manually from the links database solve the problem for you? I wonder what causes these strange characters to get into the database and if this is what is causing the errors.

Any headway on this yet? Thanks.

Funkmaster Huge

So using the jump.cgi version 2.0 with my links version 1.1 should solve the problem?

Would I just transfer it over or whould I have to make some changes to the code in junmp.cgi ver2?

You would need to use the jump.cgi from version 2.0, and also the nph-build.cgi. Specifically you need to use the part that builds the url.db and counts all the hits.

It would require some careful cutting and pasting though and some perl knowledge.

Cheers,

Alex

Until now I was just rebuilding the database every few days until I had some time to fix this bug in jump.cgi but now the database gets corrupted every day so I am tackling this problem now. Unfortunately, I don't have much perl knowlege at all so I am just using trial and erroring with hacking the code.

I have opened up jump.cgi in version 1.1 and 2.0 and am studying them to see what code to cut and paste. Do you have any further insight on this bug or perhaps a quick fix?

I am running on Apache with Unix.

Thanks

Huge

Alex, do you know how to modify the 'flock' part of the jump.cgi to fix the problem? I've put a portion of the jump.cgi file here and it shows what my jump.cgi is so far... I am guessing that this perticular section is the culprit:


# We rebuild the URL database..
$output .= "$key$db_delim$url$db_delim$hits$db_delim$timestamp$db_delim";
$output .= join ("$db_delim", @IP);
$output .= "\n";
$line_number++;
}
}
if ($goto) {
# And print it out again..
open (URL, ">$db_url_name") or &cgierr("error in jump. unable to open url index: $db_url_name. Reason: $!");
flock(URL, $LOCK_EX) unless (!$db_use_flock);
print URL $output;
close URL;

#-------------lepo's modifications-------------
if ($in{'HM'}) { print "Location: $build_root_url\n\n"; }
else { print "Location: $goto\n\n"; }
#-------------lepo's modifications-------------

# print "Location: $goto\n\n";



Thanks in advance,

Huge

Hi Funkmaster HUGE,

Are you using the SQL-search with links 2.0 ?

You might want to try:

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/.../source/jump.cgi.txt

It was a later version 1.11 I played with (which from what you've described is different then what you have).

I was unable to find a solution that worked on everyone's machine, and am blaming flock() implemenation.

Let me know how you make out..

Alex