Last week we have received a report of a strange problem: the ORF user’s log was full of “Could not create statistics for the client. EORFStatisticsServerError/The statistics server is not initialized.” messages. We suspected a problem with the statistics, which ORF sends to our server anonymously (this data is used to feed the 24 hours statistics counters on our website, and the DNS blacklist popularity list). The statistics to be sent are stored in a file called orfstat.dat. After further examination, We have also found some “Could not load statistics. Error: EORFStatisticsServerError “Statistics file “C:\Program Files\ORF Enterprise Edition\orfstat.dat” is corrupted: XML parsing error.” messages. I asked the user to send over the above mentioned file: it was 0 Kb… Somehow, the file got corrupted beyond repair.

To solve the problem, I suggested to delete the file orfstat.dat from the ORF directory: this will not cause any trouble, since ORF will recreate the statistics file when you restart the service, so you won’t lose the statistics displayed in the Administration Tool either (Configuration / Information / Statistics).

I also suggested to disable sending anonymous statistics sending in Configuration / Global / Statistics if the corruption happens again, but it seems to be OK now. We are still investigating what might have caused this (we suspect some MSXML related problem). Though we received only a single report so far, which clearly points to a system specific problem, I thought it would be better to publish the solution if you experience similar things. Has anyone seen such messages in the ORF log recently?