White Screen of Death

[InebriatedChaos]

I need help with my forums, located at www.gamers-nation.com/forum [nofollow]. All I am getting is a white page and I am not sure why. The following is a list of the things that I have done.

Delete my forum and reupload the latest package and reinstall the forum, once you complete all the steps it still goes to a white screen
I have ran the Repair.php utility and verified all the correct settings
I have also edited the php files in order to increase the memory, that is one of the things I found while searching the forums

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

-Frank

[JBlaze]

The white page means that PHP is experiencing a fatal error. You will need to get your server error logs to find out what's causing it. If you can't find them on your own, you will need to speak with your host.

[InebriatedChaos]

I was told by my host that everything is fine on their end.

They also put this in there, not sure if this will help.

http://gamers-nation.com/forum/phpinfo.php [nofollow]

Please let me know of something else that I can try.

[qc]

I had a quick look at your phpinfo:

error_reporting is set to 24567, which equals error_reporting(E_USER_DEPRECATED | E_DEPRECATED);

error_log is active, but you probably can't access it (please check your web root directory again, is there a log folder?).

For now, I recommend putting error_reporting(E_ALL); at the very beginning of your index.php file and report back with what you see when accessing your forum.

[InebriatedChaos]

Now it just says

error_reporting(E_ALL);

With nothing else but a white screen

[Kindred]

Qc is incorrect in his instruction.

Look for an error.log, error_log or something similar
Your host seems like they are either stupid or lazy... They should be able to help you find and interpret the log

[InebriatedChaos]

Ok got rid of what he wanted me to use.

There is no error.log or error anything within the forum directory or my initial directory

[Illori]

does your hosts control panel have an error log section?

did you recently change anything that could have caused this? if you did not did your host upgrade something on the server side?

[InebriatedChaos]

No log files at all that I can find.

I currently have a ticket open with them and the last thing they said was something about mod_security.

Not sure what that is.

Any other random ideas?

Still annoys me that this is a fresh install.

[Kindred]

mod_security does not usually trigger the White Screen of Death
Mod_security *IS* an issue (because most hosts configure it poorly) but has different effects from the WSoD

the WSoD is due to a complete failure on the server side of things...
Your host SHOULD be able to tell you why by looking at the server logs.
At the very least, they should be able to tell you how to turn ON the error logging so that you can see the triggering issue.

[qc]

Qc is incorrect in his instruction.

...hm, why incorrect? I should possibly have stated that the error_reporting(E_ALL); must go after the <?php. Of course, php error reporting won't help us if it is the whole process / webserver that is crashing. But we can't know that yet...?

InebriatedChaos could also try to put the following two lines after the <?php in his index.php
ini_set('display_errors',1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);

As long as he has no access to the error logs, this is all he has left. That - or manually placing exit('debugging...'); calls in his index.php and included files until he identifies the line that causes the failure.

[Illori]

you do know how many files are part of SMF? if you were to add that call in every file at some point to test, it would take forever and you may not find the right location.

[qc]

you do know how many files are part of SMF?

Yes.

if you were to add that call in every file at some point to test, it would take forever and you may not find the right location.

Probably, that's why - if this were the only debugging tool I had - I would chose a more intelligent strategy, e.g. by placing these calls before critical includes and then following the code execution path...

Even if you had to debug 100000 lines of code this way, you would only need to sequentially place 17 exit(.,.); calls to identify the exact line that causes the failure.

[qc]

@InebriatedChaos

I had a look at your phpinfo again and it seems the values for error_log and error_reporting have changed, so either you or your support must have modified the PHP configuration in /home/tasty2/public_html/php.ini - do you have access to that file?

Also, when opening http://www.gamers-nation.com/forum/SSI.php it shows two errors caused by two different mods. So you do not have a 'pure' SMF installed which means you either succeeded installing and then added some mods and it failed afterwards (in which case we need to know the mod you installed) or you did not perform a clean installation of SMF (e.g. old files might have been present and not been overwritten with the new version).

I recommend to try again with a clean installation of SMF if you cannot identify the issue by other means.

[nend]

I am just thinking here, but to me it looks like the buffer is being destroyed.

Headers are being sent, I am getting a session, just no html.

[InebriatedChaos]

This is what I am getting through my host;

Code Select Expand

Thank you for your reply.

It's almost certain your forum is not down due to anything wrong with the server. Instead, it's rather likely your forum has been exploited. The server is running :

Apache Version 2.4.16
PHP Version 5.6.16
MySQL Version 5.6.29

You appear to have updated your SMF forum to 2.0.11. Did you update your SMF installation before or after it went down with a blank page? If you updated it afterwards, what version were you running before?

I also reset your database user password for the MySQL user your SMF forum uses to connect to its MySQL Databases. As expected, that wasn't the issue. It would seem you tried to do that yourself already. You appear to have created a new MySQL user, assigned it with full privileges to the same MySQL database then updated your settings.php file with the new MySQL user name and password. I made sure that the MysQL user in question has full privileges to the database and that that is indeed the password set for it.

The blank page persists.

Error logging and reporting is already enabled. I added the following lines :

error_reporting = 4339
display_errors = On
display_startup_errors = On
log_errors = On

log_errors_max_len = 1024
ignore_repeated_errors = Off
ignore_repeated_source = Off
html_errors = Off

to your public_html/gamers-nation.com/forum/php.ini file and :

<IfModule mod_suphp.c>
suPHP_ConfigPath /home/[redacted out]/public_html/gamers-nation.com/forum
</IfModule>

to your public_html/gamers-nation.com/forum/.htaccess file. The changes to this file should make it so the php.ini file in your public_html/gamers-nation.com/forum folder is used by all php scripts in both that directory as well as any subfolders for their settings.

I also tried changing the following line :

error_reporting(defined('E_STRICT') ? E_ALL | E_STRICT : E_ALL);

to:
//error_reporting(defined('E_STRICT') ? E_ALL | E_STRICT : E_ALL);
error_reporting(4339);
ini_set('display_errors', 1);

in your public_html/gamers-nation.com/forum/index.php .

Still no errors were displayed. This is quite indicative of your forum having been compromised as SMF doesn't normally refuse to display any errors this way.

Please be aware that settings in the php.ini file can be overridden inside php scripts themselves (this is normal, it's just how the PHP runtime was designed) such that it does not matter if you try to enable logging and displaying of errors through settings in your php.ini file if whoever compromised your forum also made sure that errors, warnings or even notices are neither displayed nor logged by expressly overriding any relevant settings in the very .php script files they compromised to that end. Which is pretty typical of such incidents.

We did indeed search through the server's error log but found no relevant info, unsurprisingly.

If you'd like to, our sysadmins can try and run a malware scan on your account to try and see which php scripts on your account have been compromised, if any.

However, before we can proceed with that we'd first need you, for security purposes


This is my joy for the week and the weekend apparently.

No mods have been installed on this round, this was just me trying to install the forum fresh while attaching itself to the previous database.

[nend]

You have something funny going on there with mod rewrite.
http://www.gamers-nation.com/forum/index.php~
http://www.gamers-nation.com/forum/forum/
http://www.gamers-nation.com/forum/forum/forum/

Can you clean out the Pretty URL items out of .htaccess?

If not, then rename your .htacces and see if that helps any.

[Kindred]

ah...     you tried a fresh installation?  How?

Did you use the install archive or the large upgrade archive?
(hint: for clean files, use the large upgrade archive, and KEEP your Settings.php, settings_bak.php, as well as the attachments and avatars directories)

Depending on what mods you may have previously installed, you may actually have HOOKS which are calling for files which no longer exist...

use repair_settings.php and use the remove all hooks option.

[Illori]

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/How_to_upload_a_fresh_set_of_files