I need to figure out what is causing my site's problem

Can you ask their support team if they see any difference in who owns the file?

I took a look at the owner / group info in FileZilla tonight. Both files have the same information for both: Owner: 1581170, Group 15000. I also uploaded the file I had downloaded previously over the file on the server. No change.

So, at this point, I think I have to get the host customer server people involved & give them all of the information I have. Whatever the problem is, it’s not the files, it’s not the permissions, it’s not the .htaccess file, it’s not a virus, it’s not a hack. I have no idea what’s left, except maybe for a the player like DJTwittr suspected.

This is weird. Truly weird.

Thanks for your help

Tony

Both files have the same information for both: Owner: 1581170, Group 15000.

those are different, not the same.

Yes, please ask your host as they will be able to look properly and possibly find it in 30 seconds.

You could also try just deleting the bad file. THEN reuploading (overlaying doesn’t always reset things…)

But yeah, I’d grab my host too! No shame in that ??

OK. I finally got the video to play. But it makes no sense to me. Let me elaborate.

I tried deleting the 10-0411-01.flv video & uploading it from my macbook. The Viper’s Video Quicktag in the post at that time read:

[flv]https://churchonhigherground.org/worship/sermons/files/2010/04/10-0411-01.flv[/flv]. It still wouldn’t play. The other file in that same folder has a similar URL in it’s quicktag, except for the file name. This second one plays but the first one wouldn’t.

Out of desperation, I typed this url into the browser address bar:

https://churchonhigherground.org/worship/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files/2010/04/10-0411-01.flv. To my surprise, the video started downloading! So I edited the post for that file & I added another quicktag:

[flv]https://churchonhigherground.org/worship/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files/2010/04/10-0411-01.flv[/flv] When I click on the player for this quicktag, the video plays!!

There seems to be something wrong with the mapping of the/worship/wp-content/blogs.dir/5 folder to /worship/sermons. So how do I find /fix this problem?

Tony

If there was, then it would affect all files, not just some.

Drawing from the insane problems I’ve had in my day job … It could be that the names are way too similar and the .htaccess rewrite is getting hung up on the filename… I have an app where, if the file names are too similar (like the first 10 characters) weirdness happens. I would be surprised if .htaccess had that problem, but it COULD be a weird regexp collision.

I would suggest trying to name your files in this kind of format: <descriptor>-<whatever the numbers mean>.flv or <numbers>-<descriptor>.flv

I tend to use things like ‘csi-1101-bagels.flv’ and that prevents weird file collisions.

And now I’m off to read up on .htaccess/regexp collisions…

Oooooooo, good catch. I hope it’s something like that.

Very interesting. I’ll try renaming the file that doesn’t work to something completely different & we’ll see what happens.

Well, that made no difference. I changed the name of the file to “Service-10-0411-01.flv”. The URL

[video src="https://churchonhigherground.org/worship/sermons/files/2010/04/Service-10-0411-01.flv" /]

still doesn’t work, but the url

[video src="https://churchonhigherground.org/worhship/wp-content/blogs.dir/5/files/2010/04/Service-10-0411-01.flv" /]

does work.

I cleared the PHP error log the other day & while I was in the control panel, I checked it and there are still no PHP errors in it. That means that whatever is going on, it’s not a problem that returns an error in PHP.

I’ve also checked the server logs but I don’t see anything there about the files, or that blog, either.

I will have to contact FatCow support tonight and see what they can find.

Thanks again

Tony

You can’t just rename the file like that (I don’t think at least) without also uploading it via the media library. Shenanigans etc, but there’s more to it than JUST the .htaccess translation. I’m about 90% sure that something IN WORDPRESS has to know how to translate files into the right blogs.dir folder.

These files are not in the database. They’re all over 100 MB in size and I couldn’t upload them using the media library. Some of them are over 200 MB in size.

To put them on the site, I FTP them up to the folder and then enter the URL in the quick tag. It was definitely working before I upgraded the site to WordPress 3.0.

And maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I need to add rows to the database for these videos? I’m going to see if I can create one using the SQL tool.

Tony

Oh. Yeah, that would make sense.

In that case, I’d just make a video folder off the main www folder

www/wp-content
www/videos/<blog number>/files/foo.flv

And then call THAT directly. Cause yeah, I can see that as an ish ??

OR I can just change the URLs in all of the posts to point to where the darn things are now, i.e. “…/wp-content/5/files/…”

Or I can write a plugin to produce the correct rows in the wp_<blog#>_posts table, as though the video were actually uploaded through media library. But, to do that, I have to figure out what one of those rows looks like. Can’t do that at my day job, though.

Tony

That works too ?? I just have a wiggy feeling about putting files in the blogs dir that aren’t actually in the media tool, y’know ??