Mint Forum

If you have the third-party “XXX Strong Mint” Pepper installed you must uninstall it before upgrading Mint. If you are new to Mint do not install XXX Strong Mint. This Pepper uses a function while recording hits that can cause a significant delay in recording a hit to your site (gethostbyaddr()).

If a hit is recorded during the update process you risk irreparably corrupting your Mint config data. Until this Pepper is updated to resolve this issue it should not be reinstalled.

The delay caused by this Pepper can also cause hits that occur during the delay to go unrecorded by Mint and its other Pepper (both official and third-party) in all versions of Mint.

Pepper which offer similar functionality (eg. SessionTracker, NameTags and the official Secret Crush) do not have this issue.

If you have already upgraded and are comfortable knowing that Mint could be missing visits as a result of having this Pepper installed, then you can keep it installed. But the official recommendation is to uninstall it.

The Pepper could be updated to correct this problem. It needs to get and cache the result of gethostbyaddr() (which can take tens of seconds to return) when viewing Mint (or otherwise asynchronously), not recording visits.

After uninstalling XXX Strong Mint all my visits went to IP 0.0.0.0. All the relevant threads are closed by blaming a third-party-pepper. My whole statistic is broken. To be honest I do not have the feeling that mint2.0 was tested well before - which is ok in an free open-source-project but not on a comercial product with a payed update!

yes, i am pissed !

hi,

i see the 0.0.0.0 ips within sessiontracker - i put the feature to take the hostnames from xxx strong mint off.

i had secret crusher installed and uninstalled it later (as i did with nearly every pepper since i had so much problems with 2.0)

what do i have to do now, and which peppers are ok within mint2.0 ?

Does this mean installing and uninstalling your pepper “secret crusher” breaks my installation ? Will reinstall “secret crusher” fix the problem or is all messed up now ?

Thank you for answering all my questions and being part of this beta-test

so after reinstalling secret crusher my first visitor in sessiontracker is shown with 255.255.255.255 … how that ?

steffx

ok, i have both XXX strong mint and secret crushes installed. if i uninstall XXX strong mint now, will that break my secret crushes installation?

OK, this is not very funny. After installing, uninstalling, re-installing extensions like “XXX Strong Mint” (simply trying to get things working) my MINT database seems broken somewhere. Crushes does not show any data (anymore). There are no third party Peppers installed anymore, just the official ones.

I verified that there is a table column called “IP_long” in the database, containing data. Still Crushes does not show anything.

What should I do now? Re-install everything and start with an empty database???

Is there any way to rapair the database if it has been corrupted by using Peppers and installing a paid MINT upgrade? (I did not know that these things are bad…)

If there is no easy way, I will start from Zero again (with an empty database and a new installation). I do not have the time to play around in MINT databases. Surely my other installations of MINT will not be upgraded.

Shaun,

Problem solved (see end of this post).

Nevertheless, here’s what happened: First, I installed MINT 2 and some of the official peppers. I copied the unofficial MINT 1 Peppers following the installation instructions. Only 0.0.0.0 IP addresses appeared in Session Tracker. Then I learnt (on your website) that I would need Secret Crush. I installed it, and everything worked. Later I uninstalled XXX Strong Mint and Session Tracker because Secret Crush provides sufficient information to me. At that point still everything seemed to work fine.

Next: I updated my MINT installtion - everything still OK.

Next: I updated Secret Crush. Ooooops - it displayed just nothing. I uninstalled it, then installed it again. Still nothing to be seen.

So I tried to find out what had happened. At that moment I did not precisely remember the steps I had taken. Maybe I had incorrectly removed XXX Strong Mint? So I re-installed it to perform a “perfect” un-installation again. Still Secret Crush did not display anything…

In the end I found out that Secret Crush’s default was to identify visitors by name - but there are no named visitors on my website. So it did not display anything. Switching to “hostname” restored the behaviour I was looking for.

Nevertheless: Maybe you want to include some “special pepper instructions” in MINT’s installation notes. (And maybe you could set Secret Crushes default display to “IP Address”.)

Thank you for your quick reply!

hi, shaun,

as i briefly mentioned in the other thread, please consider incorporating an option to search for a particular IP in secret crush, similar to what is available previously in xxx strong mint.

the other feature is to display in color red if a proxy ip is detected and to have the option to display both IP and name in the default rather than choosing one or the other but not both (again, much like strong mint)