gem, rake, webricks hangs – resolved! (damn you windows)

You know you’re in for a fun day when you go to the code that you were working on yesterday and it stops working today.

In this case, I tried to start webrick to check my site, and the damn thing would not start. It would get as far as “=> Booting WEBrick…” and then hang. Ok, fine. Google a bit, maybe it’s the firewall? stop the firewall, no good.

Then, I tried to upgrade rails. ‘gem install’ hangs, before it says “upgrading source index”. Hrm. Must be something wrong with ruby. Try “gem list -r” which does not work on this machine but does work on my other workstation. Ok, got to be a ruby problem – upgrade ruby. no good. upgrade again. no good.

Then I uninstalled, rebooted, and reinstalled. “gem install” works! hooray! I install all the dependencies I need, and try to start webrick. Same bloody issue.

At this point, it’s fairly clear that it’s not a ruby or rails issue, it’s got to be a windows issue. I google for (out of desperation) “webrick hang” and I see, 4 down, a blog entry called WEBrick Server Hangs in Windows XP – have a look and it recommends running the following command to flush the Winsock Catalogue:

netsh winsock reset

And everything is fixed. Rake runs, webrick runs, gems still work. Bye bye 3 hours of my life. Thanks Windows. You’re a champ.