Personal Server probs

Weird problem with Sambar server and one of my "local" document mappings
for a local site directory (for example "http://localhost/foo" is mapped
for the directory e:/foo which contains the web documents.) I'll try to
describe the situation as well as I can and see if anyone else has ever
encountered this or can shed light on it. 

I have a site with a shopping cart and an order form. The shopping cart
uses a database search to show approprite items for order, one adds then to
the cart using "cookies", one goes to a "show cart page", and completes the
order by filling in contact info. The order form is your standard
fill-in-the-blanks form, nothing fancy except I'm using a javascript cookie
to save the contents of the form, in case the user has to go back to the
form to complete missing information. 

Both the shopping cart and the standard order form use the same two perl
scripts, one to present a confirmation page with the order total,  and the
next to submit the order by email (or as a text file on my machine.) 

Yesterday both scripts ran on my machine with Sambar server without a
hitch. Suddenly today, for no reason which I can discern, neither
application will run (no changes were made since yesterday) and once Sambar
has a problem with it refuses to load any other page in the site or to even
reload the "site", unless I re-open the browser or restart the server. (in
this case IE4) I just keep getting the error message "The server returned
an invalid or unrecognized response." (Both scripts run on the web site
server that the domain is on, so I know there's actually nothing wrong with
the scripts.) 

Yet on another "local site" I have another shopping cart/order application
working with virtually the same scripts and it works fine. I've tried
copying the troubled files to another directory, setting up a new mapping,
and it still won't play.  

There's apparently a bug with one of the scripts as the quantities for
orders sent from the order form is coming up in the email as "0" whereas
they are being submitted properly from the shopping cart (using the same
scripts). Should be fairly easy for me to fix but I cannot, however, track
down the source of the problem without being able to test it on my machine.   

Other factors affecting this may be that I have Win '98 running on a
network. There's one other machine running all the time,  I'm using it to
run a network drivre which only my machine can access (the other two
computers on the network are not on much of the time and really shouldn't
be affecting this). I'm not sure if some sort of network security issue
might be at work here and unfortunately I'm not knowledgable enough with
network and server adminstration to track that down. Sambar is not
servicing any other machines on the network. Recently my browser started
nagging me to dial in while trying to access pages on the local server (not
always) or to dial in while browsing the internet after I was already
dialed in. In the former case I can't link to any local pages UNLESS I dial
in, but then I can close the connection and carry on, in the other case I
just click "cancel" and carry on normally. 

This has been a long message and I hope anyone who waded through it might
be able to shed some light...



cheers,

Nancy


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hypertext digital publishing
Graphic Design & Website Development 
http://www.hypertextdigital.com
nancy(at)hypertextdigital.com
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