Dreamhost, Django, Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi Post on Oct 28, 2009

This problem comes up from time to time on my Dreamhost account, I get a long page load, finally ending with a 500 error in the browser. Tail'ing the apache error_log shows:

...
[Wed Oct 28 13:48:37 2009] [error] [client 198.53.10.99] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi
[Wed Oct 28 13:48:37 2009] [error] [client 198.53.10.99] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi
[Wed Oct 28 13:48:40 2009] [error] [client 198.53.10.99] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi
[Wed Oct 28 13:49:18 2009] [error] [client 198.53.10.99] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi
[Wed Oct 28 13:49:21 2009] [error] [client 198.53.10.99] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi
[Wed Oct 28 13:49:58 2009] [error] [client 198.53.10.99] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi
[Wed Oct 28 13:50:39 2009] [error] [client 198.53.10.99] Premature end of script headers: dispatch.fcgi
...

But where's the real error?

A little trick for you: go to the folder where your dispatch.fcgi file is and type:

./dispatch.fcgi

Basically you are executing the script, similar to an incoming request. You should then see the original traceback.

Hth,

Aaron

Dreamhost and Django (fcgi) caching Post on Oct 28, 2009

Every once in a while (while dabbling with Django on Dreamhost) I run into the problem that Dreamhost appears to cache my site. I've even canned the db or deleted the settings file to try and provoke an error. But the site ticks on (for a bit anyway), and I want to see results now! damnit...I am after all hacking on the live site instead of my staging server! Talk about living on the edge!

The cure

Thwart the so-called caching with a mighty blow to the process itself, it will be restarted at the next request:

killall -USR1 dispatch.fcgi

Thanks to the dreamhosters forum for the tip.

Af

Dreamhost and SMTP server Post on Jun 10, 2009

I was monkeying around a little bit for a friend earlier, trying to set them up on one of our outgoing mail servers, since our ISP server has been a little funky lately. I just wanted to note that Dreamhost SMTP server works on port 587 and not 25. When you try and send mail, it will not authenticate on port 25.