The tale of broken GeoIP from remote lands

A long time ago when the world was new, stones were soft, the animals could talk and the memory was young, Batman team (for reference- all 4 of our support teams are named after superheroes- Superman, Batman, Ironman & Hulk) promised to protect all Support clients from downtime and make them happy any way they can.

Few weeks ago we braced ourselves- the winter was coming. We went to Cyprus- land of the kings, miracles, warm weather and wine.. a.k.a “Scandiweb winter office”.

One merchant was in trouble and looking for help. Their website was down with 500 error after php upgrade from version 5.6 to 7. Our team had 4 hours to make the website work and we couldn’t let the downtime to stretch out any further. Since this was a new client, we also wanted to leave a good impression.

We tried to find something, any hint that showed what could be wrong but all log files were empty. The team had to debug live site line by line and after a good hour or two we finally found something — php-GeoIP extension.

So.. what about it?

After php upgrade clients’ developers at the time forgot to re-install it. Our team carried on with fixing the problem — GeoIP extension was successfully reinstalled and was working perfectly. Website was finally back up, but only homepage was working, everything else was blank.. absolutely blank.

This was turning out to be a very long day..

After a glass of wine and consultation with the master Google, one of the teammates found that Magento Compiler was enabled and stuck. We tried clearing compiler cache and voila- everything was back up and running even better than before. The last problem (as always- they come in bunch) was missing Instagram blog styles. Of course, we found the extension & needed styles file and added them back where they belong.

What can be said in the end? Client was really happy with the work- they gave the Batman team a nice, positive feedback. The client has stayed with us since then. The night of fighting was not held in vain.

Author: Anna Guseva & Andrejs Kovtuns, Support developers

Check out more of our Magento development and support services here!

If you enjoyed this post, you may also like