Jon Legree wrote:
THE QUESTION: Is there anything in the system environment (Red Hat linux 7.1, perl 5.6.0 - upgraded to 5.6.1 in an attempt to fix the problem, apache 1.3.x) that would suddenly cause grep or regular expression functions, or simple file access/reading functions to stop working or not work right? This system has worked perfectly for 3 years, and nothing has been changed recently.
It is possible that certain environment variables, such as the local variables (LANG and LC_*: you can get a list of them along with their current value by running `locale') might change how certain regular expressions behave by changing what counts as a letter, though I am not absolutely certain of this. Some Linux distributions ship with the locale set to C or POSIX; I think Red Hat defaults to a human language like EN_US. But I can't really see how this would cause the behaviour you are describing.
I would be inclined to look through the code to try to find where the authentication is done. It is possible that there is a bug in the code that is interacting with some recent additions or changes you made recently to your data files. If you have an older backup copy of card numbers and guest ids, you might be able to see if you can reproduce the bug using the older data set to see if it is, perhaps, the interaction of a code bug with some new data.
-- William Wueppelmann Electronic Systems Specialist Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions (CIHM) http://www.canadiana.org/
