Ever since we moved books.perl.org to a new server a few months ago after Iain's untimely passing we've had issues with it staying up.
Dave Rolsky has been kind enough to take over maintenance of the site and get it running on the new box. (It's heavily based on his Alzabo OO mapper, so he was the best choice for the job.) Neither of us could figure out why the site would start throwing errors, with nothing in the PostgreSQL or Apache logs.
Turns out, the PostgreSQL server was restarting nightly, to rotate logs, and do something or other. Shouldn't be a problem, right? Apache::DBI will perform a ping, and reconnect if necessary. Not if we don't call connect() before trying to use the database.
Oops.
I'll leave figuring out why it doesn't blow up anyway as an excercise to the reader. As a hint, think about how mod_perl works and provides a persistent perl session.
Anyway -- books.perl.org should be stable again. Visit. Buy books. Rate books. Review books. Enjoy.
