For those of you who have been following the perils of this blog lately, you know that the latest implementations of perl/mysql/cpanel have knocked out some of the Movable Type scripting that makes comment and entry posting-and-rebuilding work. The dreaded “500 – Internal Server Error” messages have plagued both commenters and myself alike. It’s all very technical, but let me see if I can lay it out so that maybe you can clear it up if you’re having these problems yourself.

First of all, the errors are not fatal. They only occur on a save-and-rebuild with making new blog entries and with making new comments. The entries and comments are saved, but the pages are not rebuilt. That can be solved by a manual rebuild. Everything gets saved and eventually appears on the site, it’s just that the rebuilding must be done manually.

The fix: in the perl scripts, downgrade the DBI to 1.47, and downgrade the DBD::Mysql to 2.9006. If you don’t run your own server, then ask your web host to do it for you. However, you must also tell them to reset the cpanel autoupdate for your site so that it does not automatically reload the upgrades every night. My web host did this once, and it worked for 12 hours or so, then reverted. I told them of this, and again, they fixed it. They did not tell me if it involved further settings changes, but it was likely something in the cpanel that continued the autoupdate. So stress to your web host that the cpanel autoupdate must be verified as turned off, and then wait 24 hours to make sure that took hold. I’m still not clear as to whether the problems will return yet again, but it is clear that they are fiddling with the right toggle which gets rid of the bugs. I’ll let you know when the problems have stayed away for more than a day.

This should end your MT blog problems for the time being. Word has it that the developer of DBI::Mysql has versions 3.0000_0 and 3.0001_0 out by now, but whether that will fix the Sql/MT bug or not, I cannot say. More news as it comes in.

Update: for four days in a row, my web host tried to disable the automatic upgrading of the site, and on each day the fix worked–for about half a day. The auto-update kept kicking in and the errors would return. Well, maybe five times lucky: my host has disabled the auto-update completely now, so let’s see how that plays out.