[Zope] Unexplained restart on add

[Terry Hancock]

Hi All,

By design, I have my development server and production
server running the same version of Python and Zope.

However, when I tried to install my newly developed
product on the production server, I ran into problems,
despite the fact that I have practiced this several
times now on the development server which you would
think would be pretty much the same.

The problem is that, although the product shows up
in the product control panel okay, attempting to
add the main object from the product into a folder
causes the server to restart (some of the lesser
objects defined by my product will add without
problems).

To make matters worse, it does this without any kind
of explanation: no traceback, no log messages (other
than the normal shutdown and restart messages -- which
proves it *is* logging events).  The browser just
reports a "refused" error message and visiting the
control panel shows a short time since the last restart,
indicating that it restarted. The events log shows
the regular shutdown and restart events -- exactly
as if I had clicked on the restart button in the
control panel.  It's really pretty infuriating!

Also, frankly I don't know how they get it to restart
on failures, anyway. My development server doesn't
do that -- I occasionally get hangs or crashes, but
never restarts.  Obviously that would be a nice thing to
be able to do in a production setting, but I don't
understand how the magic works.

There are, of course, lots of little differences:
* I'm running Debian Linux and they are running FreeBSD
  (I think), though both are Intel architecture and
  the packages are installed from source. (I'm not
  using the Debian Zope package, but one downloaded
  from www.zope.org).

* I run Zope as a special user, while they have it
  starting as "root" (which means it should run as
  "nobody" IIRC).

* I use the default file-storage, whereas they run ZEO
  to separate the storage process (I think it still uses
  file-storage, but from ZEO).  They claim this is
  faster even though the site isn't replicated.

* There are some products in their Zope install that
  aren't in mine -- a hot fix, and some other, apparently
  unrelated things.

So -- any ideas about what could cause this other
Zope instance to restart silently without generating
any error messages?   Bear in mind that it added without
incident on another machine running the same version of
Python and Zope -- it has to be something specific to
this other Zope setup. A general problem with my product
would be expected to fail on both machines.

The only time I saw something at all similar to this
was a crash (on my development server) which occured
because a file referenced in a DTMLFile() method didn't
exist. But that at least reported an IOError in the
log file, which this isn't doing.

I'm aware of course, that with such a new product,
this is most likely something wrong in my product --
just something that only shows up on certain configurations
of Zope. What I'm looking for is some way to get more
error reporting out of Zope so I can figure out what's
causing the problem.

Thanks,
Terry

-- 
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Terry Hancock
hancock@anansispaceworks.com       
Anansi Spaceworks                 
http://www.anansispaceworks.com 
P.O. Box 60583                     
Pasadena, CA 91116-6583
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