I recent topic on CFGURU about clients who blame the technology rather than trying to diagnose the real problem reminded me of a couple of funny tech support stories I thought I would share where the client has incorrectly blamed ColdFusion/Hosting for their problems.

When is ColdFusion not ColdFusion, when it's PHP of course

I had a client (lets call him Dick) kept complaining that their site had stopped working AGAIN usually telling us there was a server problem and to restart CF as it was broken, every time I checked everything was working fine on the server, cf was working etc. They would never give us any more info about the problem other than that CF was broken.
It eventually turned out that they had got their site redeveloped some time ago  in PHP and also moved the hosting elsewhere as well, so not only was it not a CF site, but we were not even hosting it :-)

Every so often we will get another email from them saying they have problems with FTP, email or something, and each time we have to explain that we cannot help as we are not their host. Hopefully one day someone will update their records

2 sites are better than 1

Another client (lets call her Dizzy) emailed us to say that the changes she was making to her site were not showing up and ColdFusion must be broken. Bear in mind that we did not develop her site, so shouldn't be supporting it either really, but i'm such a helpful chap yaknow .
I got her to give me the URL of her admin interface, I logged in saw her changes, made some of my own changes, checked the site and there were the changes, no problems.
I couldn't understand why she couldn't see her changes, I got her to clear her cache, restart browser etc, after many exchanges of emails and phone calls, I eventually got her to send me a screen shot, at which point I noticed that the domain name was totally different to the one she sent me.
It finally transpired there were 2 different domains each hosting an exact copy of the site, one was hosted with us, one was hosted elsewhere.
When she edited her site, she did so on www.domain1.com/admin but then viewed the site on www.domain2.com, why I have no idea, but that was why she couldn't see her changes as she making them on a totally different site.

Unfortunately this happened every time she made changes to her site, she would contact us and we would go through this all over again.

Have you ever needed to login to webmail, a support ticket system, online gaming or in fact any site where you have multiple logins or simply need to login as someone else to check something. This is usually a pain in the backside, as you have to logout as your current user, then login as someone else, then remember to logout and login as yourself again.

Thankfully with the current browsers there is now a simple solution to this called “Private browsing”, which allows you to open a new (private) browser window which is isolated from your normal browsing  and does not record any data such as history, cookies etc. As well as being useful for hiding your browsing activities from your spouse or when using a public computer in an Internet cafe, it is also great for the aforementioned purpose as well.
many of you may have noticed this option in your browser but never been sure what it does or even tried it out.

In Firefox 3.5+:
Start private browsing from tools menu or press CTRL+SHIFT+P
more details here...

In Google Chrome:
Open  Incognito Window from tools (wench)  menu or press Ctrl+Shift+N
more details here...

In Internet Explorer 8+ :
Start In Private browsing from Safety menu, or press CTRL+SHIFT+P

more details here...

In this new private window you will now be able to login to any site as a different user and also remain logged in as yourself in your normal browser window. Remember though that cookies are not saved, so once you close the window you will no longer be logged, regardless of whether you clicked any “keep me logged in” box.

I had a very weird problem today. I downloaded a CSS menu from http://13styles.com and no matter what I did I could not get the GIF images to display (using IIS7 on windows 7), all I got was "HTTP Error 401.3 – Unauthorized".

I checked the file and folder permissions, nothing wrong there and permissions were fine, authentication in IIS was fine, I was stumped.

After much head scratching I finally decided to check the file attribute properties and discovered the cause.

The "Encrypt contents to secure data" option was checked. Unchecking this and re-saving solved the problem.

It seems I must have enabled encryption on my drives at some point, and even though it is now disabled, new files are still being created with this option enabled, which obviously plays havok with images on web pages.

Anyway hopefully this may help others from a lot of head scratching over this one.