Shipping Rate Quote Problem

[Boyd]

Folks,

 

Any help with this would be much appreciated.

 

Normally, my cart gives live rate quotes from both Fed Ex and USPS, but suddenly last night sometime, both broke at apparently the same time.

 

Here is what the customer sees now:

------------

Federal Express?

 

No Rates Returned, :

 

 

United States Postal Service?

 

An error occured with the USPS shipping calculations.

If you prefer to use USPS as your shipping method, please contact the store owner.

 

----------

 

I phoned both Fed Ex and the Post Office and both say their servers are up and running fine. Fed Ex even checked my specific account and found it working fine. I haven't done anything with the cart code.

 

Any ideas?

 

Many thanks in advance,

Boyd

[Guest]

I will try to help you as I have other forum members some 600 times over:

 

First, I have a strong feeling that you are a cPanel user and as such have update settings that are located on the server admin side (WHM). Depending on your settings cPanel software will automatically update itself if there is something stable and available.

 

Now, judging by your proximity to my own IP block I would further assume that you would have similiar issues to something I recently encountered with the datacenter (and automatic update).

 

I have a hosting client that emailed me and pointed out he could no longer upload images and other issues. I pulled out my hair for 6 long hours trying to figure out what was wrong. Turns out the cPanel software updated Apache from version 1.3.31 to version 1.3.33 automatically. In doing so it failed to compile with several options including: GD, CURL, and OpenSSL (PHP).

 

I opened a help desk ticket (#77558) explaining the issue but in the end had to recompile Apache (and PHP) by hand via SSH including all the necessary options.

 

If you are so inclined, follow these steps:

 

1. Download the latest tarballs of Apache and PHP

2. tar -xzfv the files

3. cd into the extracted Apache directory and type ./configure --help

4. Choose the appropriate options and configure appropriately

5. Type make

6. Type make install

7. Type cd /scripts

8. Type ./restartsrv_apache

 

If that does not fix the problem then contact the datacenter to recompile Apache for you.

 

If that does not fix the problem then add some debug code to the shipping modules (add a debug switch to output the server responses).

 

If that does not fix the problem then come back and post another question on the forum.

 

Good luck.

[Boyd]

Chemo,

 

Thanks for your help.

 

I followed your advice, but unfortunately still no luck with the live quote module. No doubt the outage was caused by some sort of server upgrade as you pointed out, and specifically the inability of PHP to utilize Curl (which the live quote module needs), but all efforts to get it going have failed. I opened a ticket at the data center and made several phone calls. They seemed to have given it their best shot, including upgrading Curl. With your help I managed to restart the server and check a few other things. Still... zip, doesn't work.

 

BTW, I spoke with Steve, who wrote the Fed Ex quote module and upon hearing the symptoms, he was immediately convinced "99.9%" that Curl on my server was not functioning. I have no reason to doubt that theory.

 

Cheers,

Boyd