"couldn't retrieve anum for entry" error when exporting journals/comments

[khyron]

Greetings fellow permanent account holders! If you have a moment, I wonder if you'd mind helping me troubleshoot something? I've been running into a really frustrating LJ bug, and I know that many permies also value the ability to back up their LJ content so I thought this might be a good place to ask

Comments

[heinous_bitca]

Tried using ljdump since I'm on a Mac at work.

xmlrpclib.Fault: < Fault Server: "couldn't retrieve anum for entry at /home/lj/cgi-bin/ljprotocol.pl line 3952\n" >

Tried it on my much smaller second journal, and it went through fine, no problems.

an update from support

[khyron]

I got an e-mail reply from support due to all the comments I've been adding on to my ticket as this has been developing. I figured I'd paste it here, while there's no solid info we can at least all take some comfort in knowing attention is officially being paid and some sleuthing has been done. Fingers crossed!

Thank you for your extra information. I have passed this information on to developers. (This problem has actually been happening since before that specific change happened, but this tip allowed us to find an earlier change that probably did trigger this influx of problems at this time.) I am sorry that we don't have a timeline on when this will be resolved, but continuing to watch lj_releases will get you the most updated information on when bugfixes are live.

[quirrc]

Did you try Semagic? Links/Synchronization. It does not use xml-rpc.

[khyron]

I'm aware that Semagic can download comments as well as entries (as I recall, it does so by spidering LJ, which isn't the most server-friendly method but at this point I'm too frustrated to care). However I'm not sure whether the XML it produces will actually be useful to me (able to be imported into another blog, like Wordpress).

I decided to give it a shot anyway, and just spent an hour building an up-to-date Windows virtual machine to run it in...and guess what?

Error 500!

Sorry the service is currently unavailable due to technical issues. The page you requested is not available. Frank has been chewing on the wires again.

It's simple, LJ can sense that I want to get out of here and hates me. *sigh*

[quirrc]

Semagic now does it more server friendly than any other program. 500 error is for all users, it is turned on and off several times a day.

[khyron]

Thanks, I see lots of 500 error tickets and complaints now that I look around. Hopefully I'll be able to try this out later...I'm firing up the VM and attempting every 15-30min but so far no luck (the error is instantaneous each time).

I suppose since Semagic implements synchronization on its own, and therefore never respiders an entire journal or anything, it's probably at least as "friendly" as the XML-RPC interface is supposed to be. Ultimately I guess it matters little in my case, because I'm trying to take a complete backup from scratch.

[angharad_gov]

just adding a link to my own filed support request if you're still collecting links. having issues w/ LJ Archive as well:

http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1373088

[lisabella]

Any resolution to this? I can no longer run LJ Comment Stats and was wondering if there's a connection there.