I am BRAND SPANKIN NEW to mongrel and for a few days i could not figure out what an error was I was getting.

I have been setting up my mongrel to run off a config file so I would run this command from my rails app top level directory:

mongrel_rails start -G config/mongrel_production.yml -e production -p 8000 -d -l log/mongrel.log

and then I would start the mongrel with:

mongrel_rails start -C config/mongrel_production.yml

The first line above creates a file in config/ called mongrel_production.yml, it would set the port to 8000, the log file to log/mongrel.log, the mongrel to be a daemon process (running in the background), and would set it to production mode. The next line starts the mongrel.

Well the error I was getting happened when I wanted to stop the mongrel process:

mongrel_rails stop

the error would be:

!!! PID file log/mongrel.pid does not exist. Not running?
stop reported an error. Use mongrel_rails stop -h to get help.

I ended up communicating with Zed Shaw (who, from what i can tell is the creator of mongrel) and he said that they had some problems with the paths in version 0.3.13.3 and he recommended for me to use the latest pre-release of mongrel (which as of right now is 0.3.13.4). He told me to use this command to get the latest via gem:

gem install mongrel --source=http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/releases/

and what do you know? It worked!! now i can stop my mongrels with:

mongrel_rails stop

Well, I figured that since I’m making a go at this Rails thing I might as well use the Rails-based Blogging platform, “Typo”:http://typosphere.org.

Before I get into any details I want to say that there are a ton of very nice features of Typo like live searching and Theme switching. One major thing I liked was the support for migrating my blog articles from WordPress 2.

I hope this doesn’t become a trend for me but I’ve labeled this article “Typo, Work in Progress” because I find myself with a few issues getting it going. I hope to find the answeres to my problems and then will post updates as i get them figured out.

So, I’ve made a lot of new changes lately in the web world.. I moved all of my sites to a new hosting provider “Rimuhosting”:http://rimushosting.com (who, by the way have been FANTASTIC in helping me setup my server with the things I wanted), I’m trying out a new server configuration (Apache2 proxied to Mongrel), new Blog app, among other things.

The reason i informed you about the changes is to say that one of my Typo problems may be stemming from the server config.

Let’s talk about some frusterations of Typo.

My first major thing is that the gem install of Typo requires sqlite2-ruby. Normally this would not be a big deal to me; I would just let it install the dependency and be on my way but for some reason my system gives an error when trying to install sqlite3-ruby and therefor i can’t install Typo via gem because of it. Who uses sqlite3-ruby anyway? No offense to anyone but i only plan on using MySQL. So the thing is, Typo supports MySQL right out of the box so why are they requiring sqlite3-ruby to be installed? I DON’T WANT TO! Ok, well that throws the gem install out of the window (for me at least). My second option is to unpack the compressed file and upload it. (Don’t ask why I didnt checkout the subversion trunk, I didn’t think of it until just now, maybe I will, shut up.) Ok, well things went smoothly after that fiasco. I FTP’d the typo directory up to my server and off I went.

I do have to say that (once installed), Typo was very easy to get up and running quickly.

Ok, so here’s my work in progress problem:

Like I said before, I’m using Apache2 proxied to mongrel (not cluster as of this time).

First, my blog seems to run much slower than the other Rails apps I have on the same server.

Second, If you open up the “Activity” window in Safari (Yes, I only use Mac OS X) I get an “internal server error” on many of the .gif’s that are loaded for my theme. Now, I know that the “internal server error” is a very generic error message and it doesn’t give any explanation but I can’t find the probem in the config files.

I looked in the error log files for Apache2, nothing. I set mongrel to Debug mode and those log files didn’t show anything either. I really dont know where to go to find the problem.

So, If you have ANY suggestions for me, I would appreciate it if you posted a comment, Hopefully I will find the answer soon and post it here for any of you with the same problem.