Another boring post about technical problems

Thanks to Gordon, I seem to have kicked the .htaccess generation into gear on my WP installation, by CHMODing to 777 then back to 666. I shouldn’t need to do that, but there you go.
Naturally, all this has done is reveal a whole bunch of other problems. If I modify the permalink structure, .htaccess updates, then I get an internal server error if I go to the home page or the WP admin pages. So, apologies to those people who have been trying to look here today and have had error messages.

I’ve taken a look in my server error logs and I notice two things – firstly, when .htaccess updates, the following error is generated:

[Fri Apr 8 11:48:45 2005] [error] mod_gzip: TRANSMIT_ERROR:32

Secondly, when I try to call a page, the internal server error caused is as follows:

[Fri Apr 8 11:52:37 2005] [alert] [client 81.130.49.105] /var/www/vhosts/grayblog.co.uk/httpdocs/.htaccess: RewriteRule: cannot compile regular expression '^?p=category/(.+)/feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$'\n

So, these leads to the following questions:

1. what is a transmit error:32?
2. what causes it?
3. how do I prevent it?
4. is it related to the server’s inability to compile the .htaccess file?
5. is there something I can do to make the file compile even with the transmit error?

There is nothing in the WP Codex on this (at least, nothing that I can find) and nobody seems to have raised a similar problem in the forums – so I have opened a discussion here. One user states that he/she had the same problem with the compile error and resolved this by deleting the permalink entry from the database via their server’s database admin, and then going to the admin page and resetting it on the permalinks screen. I’ve tried that, but it does not solve the problem.
I’m out of my depth on this problem, I must admit. And my tax return has arrived through the post this morning (joy of joys!), so my mood is not great at the moment. Time for coffee and toast, I think, before I get back to the PFE accounts.