Today I noticed a correlation between the Helpdesk site going down and the inability to log into my stores admin panel.
Helpdesk site goes down and unable to log into admin panel, helpdesk site comes back up and hey presto can log into admin panel, help desk site goes down again (see screen capture) and I am lodged out of my admin panel and cant log back in again. Store front is up and running and admin panel login screen is working but login just times out.
Helpdesk site becomes active again and I can log into my admin panel.
So it appears my ability to log into the admin panel on my own website is dependant on the helpdesk website for CS Cart being operational, please tell me it is not so!!!
I cannot believe anyone would set up a piece of commercial software to operate this way.
What happens if the helpdesk has a major system failure or if god forbid if they went out of business, does that mean that all the store owners suddenly have no ability to log into their own stores admin panel i.e. their store becomes useless?
If helpdesk.cs-cart.com is not available, your login to your admin panel will be “delayed” until the connection request times out. It is the check for an upgrade being available which is being done.
Actually, any commercial entity that wants to verify licensing or provide other service will support their products through a service. Since these services are 99.9% http, they will be dependent upon the timeout settings in your Apache settings and/or the socket timeout in the TCP layer (usually burried below http and curl, etc.).
The default delay is usually about 30 seconds so your admin login process should not stall any longer than that.
Of course, a commercial entity should ensure that connections to common services have failover capability so it’s not dependent on the health of a single server, just a single domain name.
This caught me too tonight, logging into admin area was intermittent for about 90 min. Admin login came up ok, but the log in timed out. I wasn’t able to get into the cart after 30 seconds, I ended up getting a 408 timeout error. After restarting my web server and mysql, and contacting my hosting provider, I read this thread and am not pleased that the cart acts this way.
CosmeticTattooist, I think you nailed this problem, I’d bet it’s due to CSC contacting http://helpdesk.cs-cart.com and checking for upgrades using your license number. That’s the annoying orange box in the top right that I have to close every time I log into the cart. If the CSC helpdesk site is down, the cart can’t check for upgrades and times out.
THAT is a problem since there is zero indication from the cart that that is the reason why you can’t log into the admin area. And THAT sucks.
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]If helpdesk.cs-cart.com is not available, your login to your admin panel will be “delayed” until the connection request times out. It is the check for an upgrade being available which is being done.[/QUOTE]
That’s fine however under no circumstances should cutomers be dependant on the helpdesk server being operational for them to be able to log into their own shop admin site
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’]The default delay is usually about 30 seconds so your admin login process should not stall any longer than that.[/QUOTE]
Well my experience today was a complete inability to log into admin panel, repeated attempts led to page timeout well beyond 30 seconds in every instance so clearly it is not working in the intuitive way that you might expect
Also this clearly does not just related to update check on login because i was actually logged out of an active session when the helpdesk site went down, so there must be an active connection maintained during a login session. Perhaps this is something to do with licence authentication?
[quote name=‘ChrisW’] THAT is a problem since there is zero indication from the cart that that is the reason why you can’t log into the admin area. And THAT sucks.[/QUOTE]
To me the most significant issue is not that helpdesk site may go down for a short period now and then which results in the loss of access to admin panel (absurd in itself) but I am more concerned with what happens if CS Cart helpdesk went down for a prolonged period or as mentioned if they ceased trading, it appears that we would lose our carts admin panel in that instance which is unacceptable to say the least.
One could argue that the “check for updates” request shoud be done asynchronously via an AJAX request. It could then take as long as it wanted and all that would be delayed would be the response and subsequent notification.
I will argue that today’s issues are highly unsual. You wil not get the behavior defined if the server is unavailable. You will only get that if it can’t complete the request in the allotted amount of time.
I have no idea of what cs-cart’s server environment is configured like. But it appears that their external exposure does not have failover capability nor load balancing. So yes, this can be problematic if/when there are issues.
I haven’t looked at the code but since you can remove the license to avoid the notification, maybe it will fix this issue as well.?
It appears that the call is made regardless if the user has admin rights to perform an upgrade.