Standard Working Practice

Last Friday we had a problem with one of the company sites, which happens to be run on the Mambo piece of shit Content Management System. We’ve recently swapped servers for it, and moved to a hosted thing by Rackspace, instead of using the servers we own – supposedly this is a good move, because it gives us trained support people, rather than all relying on our lonely sys-admin.

Anyway, on Friday it turned out we couldn’t do some stuff on the site through Mambo, basically because the Rackspace servers are configured differently to the ones we did have, and Arsehole Boss didn’t bother to do the transfer properly, so we keep finding config problems on the “new” site where Rackspace runs things differently. In short, it’s a fuckup.

This “super-important” issue was raised at 4.45 on a Friday afternoon, and was “imperative” to be fixed before we left.

The email from me on Friday ended up as follows:

What we have established is the following :

• If you edit one of the existing links, then Mambo comes back with the "file not found" error.
• If you create a link, Mambo comes back with the "file not found" error.
• If you create a link – even to a local file on the site – Mambo comes back with the "file not found" error.

We believe that the Rackspace configuration is such that it will not allow any link for the downloads etc. to go outside the site’s domain. In other words, because of the way Mambo works (and this is not something that is alterable) whenever the docman system tries to link to a file, even on the site server, it makes an external call – i.e. it tries to go out to the web, to make an http call to get to the right place for the file. Why it does this for even a local file, I don’t know – that’s Mambo for you.

The fact that this method is shit is beside the point for now. The problem is actually with the rackspace config, and not allowing access to the outside world in this manner. This is a standard setting on hosted servers – it would be the same if we were trying to use an ODBC database connection ( i.e. to let the site use the company’s remote database, when it is on a different server)

This problem is NOT something I can fix. I can figure out *why* it’s happening – up to a point – but I can’t fix it. It is a combination of crappy coding on Mambo, and a standard security setting at Rackspace.

I do not have any contacts with Rackspace, and cannot currently start off any problem solving on this level.

At the moment, I can’t create *any* links through the docman module on Mambo, as they *all* use this method.

I’ve done all I can. I’m sorry that it’s not able to work, but I am at the absolute limit of my knowledge, both of Mambo and of Rackspace. If that is unacceptable, the only way to improve my knowledge is a training course on mambo and server admin.

The response from Arsehole Boss was a truly exhilarating piece of motivational speech… (and the spelling mistakes are included verbatim)

As I mentioned what we need here is a solution. This is still not a solution.

This is probably the most critical task the web development team has over the next 24 hours as without fixing this we cannot roll out our release which is critical to ongoing funding for the company.

If you guys are unable to collectively get togeather and find a solution – weather its via mambo or rackspace – the it raises greater concerns as to the ability of the web team to get the job done when in a crunch.

I suggest you guys focus on fixing this and nothing else before the end of monday.

It’s kind of worrying when your Chief Technical Officer (and Lead Developer) apparently doesn’t know the difference between Web developers and System Administrators, isn’t it?