Fathers for Life - Website problems are fixed now

November 16, 2008 by Walter Schneider.

During the last 24 hours the website of Fathers for Life experienced a few problems. They appear to be fixed now, but I would not bet my life on that.

It all started on Nov 12th, when Symantec Service Framework crashed every time I tried to download e-mail.  SSF worked fine, as long as I did not try to download e-mail messages.  Of course, I had to shut down my machine every time and reboot it, so to get SSF going again.

There was obviously a problem that a software update would fix.  That was the very first thing I tried, but there were no updates.  There were no updates in the morning.

I contacted Symantec for a chat session.  The technician was so kind as to give me a contact number, so that she would be able to set up remote control for my machine.  Unfortunately, she signed off, before I had a chance to tell her that the error message telling me that SSF abended showed up every time I downloaded e-mail, that therefore there was no use telling me the contact number via e-mail.

Of course, I checked Webmail, but before I had that going, the chat connection could no longer be reset, and there were now about 50 people ahead of me in the queue.

I knew that I would not be able to stay alert long enough to do things right anyway.   So I caught up on some of the sleep I had missed.

It took about three hours before a new chat session was set up again and I got a new technician.  The first thing he did was to download software updates, of whom there now were some.  He got them installed, and I was able to download e-mail again without Norton AV abending.

Unfortunately, I did not realize it at the time, there was now a problem with uploading web pages for all of the websites I am running, including the website of Fathers for Life.  It is not clear whether those problems were caused by trying to fix SSF.  Still, it was quite clear that I no longer could use my web editor to upload new or edited web pages.

I tried to circumvent that but should have known better.  If only I would have waited for those problems to clear.  Nothing I tried worked, and I caused a few problems that put all of my websites out of commission.

In the end, I got those problems fixed, got all of the websites uploaded again, and - low and behold - all of the uploading problems I had prior to that were gone - and not because I did anything to address those problems.  I have no clue what happened and who has done it.

At any rate, things are back to normal, and now I need to check what e-mail messages need looking after.

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