Migrating one machine to another is fairly simple in a home environment where you only have to copy over pictures, and maybe some music. Go though and figure out what programs you need to reinstall and what other crap you have accumulated that can be ignored to keep the new machine in a pristine, well organized state, for as long as possible.

Getting a new work, or home development, box is a little more difficult. Classpaths, dll’s, environment variables, IDE’s and API setups can be a huge pain. That is what I’ve done with most of my week. Set up a new work laptop.

At first things were going smoothly. Web development directories migrated, all java code moved, databases backed up and restored. All was going great until I tried to test the swfUpload plug-in. That’s where my last two days have gone.

A little background. I’m not a flash developer at all. I know nothing about it. But using the swfUpload plugin at work seemed to be the best way (at the time) to enable multiple file uploads rendering our previously written Java Applet obsolete. (Bear in mind this is all a few years old). The plug-in was easy to configure using some javascript and HTML markup and overall it satisfied our needs at the time.

When I attempted to upload images from the new machine to the new machine, flash would crash. No error messages, no javascript errors, no logging of any type that I could find.  I tried downloading the Live HTTP headers plugin for firefox as well as some flash log viewer  thinking I could catch the error message go by.  No luck.

I used the tool from the new machine on the production server, which contained the exact same code, and it worked. So it was not a problem with my flash install, or the new 64-bit OS, or anything on the new machine itself. It had to be a server configuration on the new machine.

Here are a few of the steps I took to debug this:

  • Checked upload paths. Fail
  • Changed permissions on the directory the files were uploading to. Still Fail.
  • Removed all of the code that did the actual upload thinking it was still a problem writing to the local box. More Fail
  • Added stupid javascript alerts to each of the handler methods in my handlers.js to trace the progress. Approaching Epic Fail.
  • Searched and failed.
  • Whined and complained while failing.
  • Got the idea of hitting the new box from the old box. That caused flash to crash on the old box. All aboard the failboat!

Finally after reading something on this thread I decided to disable AVG. No fail! Holy Shit! NO FAIL!!

Ok we’re onto something here. Something in AVG is mucking with this process. I disable each component in AVG and start re-enabling one-by-one. Right now I’ve found two different components that seem to break the swfUpload plugin. The Link Scanner, and the Online Shield. If either of these are active it won’t allow the swfUpload to work properly.

Now to figure out if I can add exceptions or not. I’ll follow up with more later.

-Puttzy

[ad] Empty ad slot (#2)!