Urgent! Need a little advice from the Zen Gurus

Out of no where yesterday we started seeing a problem with our orders. The orders are being processed; however now when a customer's order is written to the orders_products table an additional random product is being added!!

This is so weird. This does not effect the customer's order total, nor do they see this renegade product when they check out. The only time the customer sees it is on their checkout success page, it appears under "Please notify me of updates to these products".

In the admin - orders - What we see is this additional product, but even though the products price is listed - it is not added to the customer's total. It's easy to identify which is the odd product as all products are sold by sizes (shoes), the odd product never has a size associated with it.

I've created a little screen shot so you can see what it looks like in the admin.

What I've done to test so far -

As I have been asked to do additional modifications to this system, I had created a clone of the new system the night before (just did an entire rebuild a couple of weeks ago). So I have an exact copy of the files and database "before" the error started. I've created a ton of fake orders in that version and all is perfect.

Can someone give me some insight as to first of all where they think that I should look to start to trace this error. The added product is random. I can't find any correlation.

I also created another clone of the existing production db and hooked it to my test files to be sure another customer's basket wasn't somehow being added - not the case. - Under that test, the system is isolated - I'm the only one with access and when I did a test order - there is the odd product.

I was also wanting to verify if possibly a file on the production system had been corrupted - since these were the test files and work perfectly, if that were the case I should have received a normal order - no joy - the order had the same issue - so I know its not the files - the difference is definitely the db - The only changes within the time frame that this broke were the new customer orders. So I'm totally baffled. :wacko:

I'm going back and attempting to add the additional customer's one at a time to the working DB and doing intermittent tests to see if I can isolate at what point it corrupted.

If anyone has any great suggestions how to track down this problem, I would be very grateful.

Added note: Ver 1.38a and Php5/Mysql5.0

Since you have both, I'd winmerge the two sites to see just hat has changed.

I'll do that, but I truly believe the issue lies within the database. Reason - when I attach the current copy of the production db to the cloned system - the error occurs. It does not occur with the backup copy of the db from the night before.

I made a legend for myself with date and time copied for both files and db's so I wouldn't start to get lost in all this switching.

I'm d/l both the production and the cloned files now and I'll run winmerge to see if there are any differences. This happened within a three hour time period. Orders were perfect at 1pm and started the issue at 4pm. All orders since 4pm yesterday are showing the random product.

Thanks for your input. Do you know of any "non-commercial" db compare tools. I think that would be really helpful right now.

Ruth

If you have cpanel, you can use the check and repair in the database area.
or dump the database and compare those files.

Haven't tried this one but, I guess it's worth a try.

Just completed winmerge and only differences are the config files (of course), but other wise all is identical. So for sure it's the db. I'm going to check cPanel as you suggested.

thanks again!!

I overlooked your suggestion on the tool you located. I'm going to download it. I just finished importing all the orders up to the last good order to the bkup - actually a copy of it.. I don't want to lose the one good version I have working. Soon as I finished tracing all the parts of those orders and loaded them, the system broke and started adding the random product.

cPanel found no errors by the way...

If I could come up with some relationship to where its pulling the product from that would start to give me clue, but it sometimes pulls from the same category, but other times it just grabs any old product it can find and sticks it in there. This is just nuts and I think I'm going bald from pulling my hair out.

I'll post back if this solution works - but I have to see if I can use it via remote access - the dbs are just too big to load locally. I've tried every setting I can think in my local LAMP setup in order to load them with no luck. My system just times out.

I had sooo many other things to do today... I'm so frustrated!! :frusty:

I have no idea why, but it has straighten itself out!! :clap:

I just had two orders come in and no hitch hiking product was tagging along. I did an additional test order my self and all is back to normal.

I did run the db repair in cPanel, but the test order I did right after that showed no change.

I'm going to watch it closely though. This was way too stressful.

Ruth