Tracking Down An Error

[owatagal]

A visitor to one of my sites emailed me today saying she couldn't access the main content of the site--she kept getting a long error message. She didn't say anything else, but since she sent the email via the site's contact form, I'm assuming the error message had to do with the MySQL connection/database.

 

I'm sure I could submit this as a ticket to the help desk, but for my own education I'd like to know if there's anything else I can check, because I keep coming up empty.

 

I looked in the error log in CPanel first, but it lists a single page not found error. That's not the problem.

 

I checked Awstats just for fun, but it didn't have anything useful in its HTML errors either (not that I expected it to).

 

I downloaded the raw logs and, using the time of the form submission, I think I isolated her visit. A typical page visit from her looks like this:

 

[iP address removed] - - [01/Dec/2005:18:50:05 -0500] "GET /archives/poetry.php?author=rivera HTTP/1.1" 200 136 "ht*p://mywebsite.com/archives/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0"

 

If I remember right from the last time I dug in the raw logs, the "200" after the "GET" part means the HTML page was ok. So that doesn't help either.

 

And I don't know where to go from here. Are MySQL errors stored anywhere that I can access them? Have I exhausted what I can do through CPanel and the raw logs and should I submit a ticket? Right now the site is working fine for me and I can't reproduce the error, so it's not like this is a critical issue, but I would like to know what went wrong so I can try and prevent it from happening again.

[TCH-Bruce]

Without the error message it would be impossible to tell you how to proceed.

 

I get these kinds of calls at work all the time. Without an error code or clue of what they were doing when they got the error there is no way I can determine their problem.