The Mysterious (Periodic) Disappearance of Minivend...

[March Rosenbluth <march@uia.net>]

Greetings!
	
	I've encountered a strange problem in my use of Minivend.  Periodically -- 
ranging from an hour to several days -- Minivend just disappears.  A 
restart shows it unable to find a running instance, giving the error that 
tells you to try killing it to see if it stopped normally.  None of the 
error logs show any comment at all -- the catalog specific one has two 
errors in it which repeat over and over but happen frequently without 
causing the problem and show no sign of being related.  Just in case, they 
are as follows:

193.149.76.206 bI3FeJSQ:193.149.76.206 - [21/October/1999:13:45:16 -0700] 
simple /cgi-bin/simple/process Custom shipping field 'weight' doesn't 
exist. Returning 0
150.176.206.67 xujbI3Fe:150.176.206.67 - [21/October/1999:13:46:24 -0700] 
simple /cgi-bin/simple/process Bad search column 'code'

The minivend error log doesn't show a thing -- it shows the catalog being 
started up, and then nothing until it's started again.  The apache error 
log is currently completely blank.

	We are using Perl 5.005, Apache 1.34, BSDI 4.01, and Minivend 3.14-3, and 
are running only one catalog, which is based on the simple catalog.  I saw 
in the archives that there was apparently a similar problem with earlier 
versions of Minivend and BDSI together, but I couldn't find any solutions. 
 Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks very much!
	
	-- March