Major problem - some people can\'t access my site whilst others can

Started by Threepwud, July 31, 2008, 04:53:43 PM

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Threepwud

I have upgraded to 2 beta 3 and moved the whole forum to another folder.

Was at http://www.hldrforum.com but I have now moved the site to public_html/forum and created a sub domain called forum. The main page is now also set to get to http://www.hldrforum.com/forum .

Many people got there well enough but some important people can't make it. Quite a few...

They get this message each time:

Connection Interrupted
The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading
The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.

This happens to any part of the site. The weirdest part is that one member who reported this has been to the site after I moved it.

Any help is greatly appreciated and needed... my site is just picking up and I can imagine it dying if I can't fix this!

My thanks to you all,
Stu

lordtron


VainSoftGames.com - New Design To Gaming

Threepwud

thanks mate -

I've tried every type of combination and link, to no avail. Seems anything to do with my site at all but as I said it works perfectly well for others.


bros

This happened to me with a few members on my site.

have them edit their hosts file to have the IP point to your site.



metallica48423

lol...

if you're getting that message across your site, its most likely a problem with your webhost and not the software running on it.

I'd contact the host
Justin O'Leary
Ex-Project Manager
Ex-Lead Support Specialist

QuoteMicrosoft wants us to "Imagine life without walls"...
I say, "If there are no walls, who needs Windows?"


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Deprecated

My comment seems a bit rude now that I reread it, and I apologize. :)

I should have just posted the link.



Or maybe I should have quoted the entire Wikipedia article... ;)

Deprecated

Hey Threep, I don't know if this is your problem, probably not, but it's a bit of weirdness you might want to look into.

First of all, www.hldrforum.com/forum is not a subdomain. WWW is a subdomain. Your /forum is just a directory on your server. Just to get our terms straight so that there's no confusion.

The weirdness is that your first URL posted in the OP gets headers showing a permanent redirect 301 to http://www.forum.hldrforum.com while the second URL gets a permanent redirect 301 to http://www.hldrforum.com/forum/  ???

Here's the headers for the first URL:http://www.hldrforum.com/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hldrforum.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=252911.new
Cookie: PHPSESSID=vrnlpumdjdl41geahqmuule874

HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:12:49 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.4mm
Location: http://www.forum.hldrforum.com
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.forum.hldrforum.com/

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.forum.hldrforum.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=252911.new
Cookie: PHPSESSID=vrnlpumdjdl41geahqmuule874
If-Modified-Since: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:09:23 GMT

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:12:49 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.4mm
Cache-Control: private
Content-Encoding: gzip
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.5
Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:12:49 GMT
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
----------------------------------------------------------


And the second URL:http://www.hldrforum.com/forum

GET /forum HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hldrforum.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=252911.new
Cookie: PHPSESSID=vrnlpumdjdl41geahqmuule874

HTTP/1.x 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:13:20 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.4mm
Location: http://www.hldrforum.com/forum/
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
----------------------------------------------------------
http://www.hldrforum.com/forum/

GET /forum/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.hldrforum.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=252911.new
Cookie: PHPSESSID=vrnlpumdjdl41geahqmuule874
If-Modified-Since: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:11:39 GMT

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:13:20 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.37 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635.SR1.2 mod_ssl/2.8.28 OpenSSL/0.9.7a PHP-CGI/0.4mm
Cache-Control: private
Content-Encoding: gzip
Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.5
Last-Modified: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:13:20 GMT
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
----------------------------------------------------------


As I said, this may have nothing at all to do with your problem, but perhaps it does.

I suggest you should post your .htaccess file here if you want to explore this. Even if it's not a problem, you should set that first 301 to refer to the same target as the second one.

Threepwud

Quote from: Deprecated on August 01, 2008, 11:01:43 AM
My comment seems a bit rude now that I reread it, and I apologize. :)

I should have just posted the link.



Or maybe I should have quoted the entire Wikipedia article... ;)

Ha, thanks mate, no worries. All help is appreciated, cheers.

Threepwud

I only have one redirect active so I'm a little unsure as to how that has happened. I DID have it being redirected to http://www.hldrforum.com/forum/index.php but that opened the site at the original hldrforum.com site (that forum is still there) inside the shoutbox area. Very weird - so i changed it again to direct to http://www.forum.hldrforum.com and it loaded correctly again.

I've attached my .htaccess file. It was stored in the public_html folder whilst the forum folder had nothing.

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hldrforum.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.hldrforum.com$
RewriteRule ^/?$ "http\:\/\/www\.forum\.hldrforum\.com" [R=301,L]

Thanks once again for your time!

Deprecated

This is getting a bit confusing and I'm coming up on dinner time so I'll have to study your file after dinner and get back.

What I don't quite understand is why you want www.forum.hldrforum.com ... most sites would pick either hldrforum.com or www.hldrforum.com or forum.hldrforum.com ... You appear to be needlessly complicating your problem by adding sub-domains and sub-sub-domains.

com is your top level domain
hldrforum is your own domain
forum would be a sub-domain
www would be a sub-sub-domain

Just what do you hope to accomplish with all that?

Let me suggest something:

pick either www.hldrforum.com or just hldrforum.com

pick either / or /forum

BTW that /forum is just a directory in your site's file structure.


Now another question, have you used your cpanel to set up that .forum. subdomain? You can't put one in by use of your .htaccess file alone. You must have done something else, and if you haven't then I can't see how that will work. If you have set that up in your cpanel it would be good to see what it is.

I'll likely be back after dinner. :)

Deprecated

Just to elaborate, there's a reason for the www.example.com vs. just plain example.com and I doubt many people realize it.

If you have a busy server with ftp, http, email and other traffic going through it and you're a growing company, one day you will likely overload your server. The easiest way to distribute load on your URL is to separate out your traffic as follows:

http traffic to www.example.com on IP address #1
ftp traffic to ftp.example.com on IP address #2
smtp traffic to smtp.example.com on IP address #3

Each of this subdomains resolves to a different address and the traffic goes to the right server without taking any time away from the other servers. The servers can even be in widely separated geographic locations and the Internet takes care of all the routing.

Now on in a shared hosting environment you have exactly the opposite. You have 50-100 URLs all going to a single server. It handles every single request, looks at the requested URL, and decides which folder to serve that request out of, IOW your dedicated folder on the shared server.

I can't think of a single reason to have subdomains on a website being served by a shared server. Maybe there is a good reason, but I certainly don't know it.

So just consider that we can make pigs fly with sufficient thrust, but that begs the question of why anybody would want pigs to fly. :)

So why do you want a sub-sub-domain?

Threepwud

Wow, thanks for all the info!

So, I don't need the subdomains... ok, that's good. Might improve if I delete them?

I have a few different forums installed (back ups and tests) so have a sub domain for each one. So I guess I don't need them.

Excellent - make things a little simpler!

Http://www.hldrforum.com takes you to one forum (using an older database) and http://www.hldrforum.com/forum is the address for the current version, thus the redirection.

So if I redirect to http://www.hldrforum.com/forum it should all be a lot simpler (if I understood you correctly).

All sub-domains were created through the use of cPanel.

Deprecated

I think for your purposes you should set http://www.hldrforum.com to recirect to http://www.hldrforum/forum. That would be a lot simpler and you can reverse it if you find problems.

Just remember the lesson that sub domains are not sub folders. You need a good reason to invoke more complicated concepts.

I'll help you write your .htaccess tomorrow, and actually it might benefit me to write it too, not on my main sites but I have a few sites I'm considering for redirection and I'm learning as I go along.

Yeah this is like having an amateur brain surgeon, but I offer the same deal. If it doesn't kill you you owe me a beer! ;)

I'll see ya tomorrow. Post in this thread if I forget to reply. I'm watching all threads that I've posted in. Don't worry, I'll get you going if nobody else finds your problem first.

metallica48423

I guess i'm owed a lot of beer then :P

Thanks for taking this on, Deprecated :)
Justin O'Leary
Ex-Project Manager
Ex-Lead Support Specialist

QuoteMicrosoft wants us to "Imagine life without walls"...
I say, "If there are no walls, who needs Windows?"


Useful Links:
Online Manual!
How to Help us Help you
Search
Settings Repair Tool

ccbtimewiz

In order to script this, you can create a file called index.php in the directory you wish to redirect, and put:

<?php header("Location: url"); ?>

With url as the URL of the redirect. :)

Deprecated

Metallica, no thanks needed. :) It's kind of satisfying meeting a challenge, and it's fun learning new things. Also, my problems are likely to be of a more severe nature, and if I provide a lot of help here in the forum I'm likely to be noticed and to receive more enthusiastic help from the experts. :)

CCB, you bring up a good point, something I already realized yesterday... Often in support situations the person with the problem is having trouble making something work. In helping them, many times you focus on trying to make what they are doing work, without ever thinking of the bigger picture. The real question behind any support problem is WHY? What I mean is what is the bigger problem they are trying to solve? What are they trying to achieve?

Maybe the way they are trying to solve their bigger problem is totally inappropriate. I was thinking of that yesterday with the sub-domains and sub-sub-domains. I'm still trying to figure out the OP's bigger problem but I didn't realize that until I read your post CCB. I was boxed in until I realized that sub-domains had nothing to do with the bigger problem. I've realized now that we are still thinking inside the box. We need to think outside the box to get the OP fixed up.

Maybe the OP should just use the PHP with the HTTP redirect and put that in his root and problem solved, if that's the only problem he has. Perhaps he wants to use his root for something else? I don't know.

Another way the OP could have solved his problem is in cpanel. He could have made a new directory in his root at his hosting provider, then simply reassigned his URL to the new folder and installed the new forum. That would allow him to switch back and forth between the old and new forum with a simple cpanel operation, and none of the members would have ever had any issues.

Getting back to Apache .htaccess files for a few comments: Sometimes it is simply amazing what you can do with .htaccess. Apache gurus are true gods with what they can accomplish! I'm an Apache n00b and I've sometimes spent hours writing 3-4 lines of .htaccess directives but I have accomplished some pretty effective things in my other websites (not forums). This stuff is well worth learning for its sake alone, even if the simple HTTP redirect works.

For example, I was looking at my forum site yesterday and it suddenly hit me, no .htaccess file! Well there's a solution lookin' for a problem, I thought. ;) As it turns out, probably EVERY website needs an .htaccess file. Well, at least every site using Apache. :)

What I realized is that I was totally dependent on my hosting service's error handling. Let's take 404 file not found as an example. I typed in a totally crazy filename after my URL and the host's error handler popped up, with a list of many of my competitors URLs, all based upon keywords in my own site. That damned hosting service was making money on click-throughs at my expense!!! Besides, their error page is majorly UGLY!

Well I copied the .htaccess error section from one of my other websites, and rewrote my error handler from that site and themed it to match my default 2.0b3.1 pages. Now if you type in a whacky file name instead of my hosting service trying to steer you to my competitors you get MY error page along with a link to my basic forum URL, and also a link to my contact form in case somebody wants to tell me what they were doing to allow me to fix the problem if it's my own fault. That's totally better, and it all relies on the .htaccess file and a PHP error handler I wrote myself.

BTW I realized last night as I was tossing and turning in bed that probably many of the people on Simple Machines could use my suggestions for a PHP error handler for their own forums. I expect I'll clean it up and post it here at a later date. My own handler doesn't use the SMF header and footer. I just copied the HTTP from viewing source on one of my pages. Before I share it I should conform it to using SMF's header and footer services so that it will fit in better and integrate better with other SMF sites. That's probably a candidate for a mod package although it doesn't actually change any SMF files per se. Just drop the error handler in your root and add the lines to your .htaccess file.

Yeah, I type an awful lot. ;) I've been writing software so long I can type almost as fast as I think, and it's nice sitting here absorbing my first cups of coffee for the day. Let's get back to the OP's problem.

Threep, just what is it you are trying to accomplish overall? It's looking more and more like you don't need your old forum active and just want to handle members who have bookmarked your old site to get them on your new site? Or what? Please describe what your goal is in simple enough terms that even I can understand it. ;) Let's see what solution is most appropriate to your goal.

Oh and CCB, there IS a good reason why .htaccess might be better than your HTTP redirect, or at least I think so. The redirect will have to be there for all time for some people, and it might screw up page ranking if that is important to the OP. For sure it would screw up page ranking if he was changing his domain, but he isn't. With the .htaccess permanent redirect web crawlers are smart enough to transfer the page ranking to the new location. I'm not sure but I think some browsers might be smart enough to fix their bookmarks for the new site, although I'm speculating and I'll have to test that and see. The simple HTTP redirect might be the best solution, or maybe not. Let's find out what the OP wants to achieve first.

ccbtimewiz

Your post was so long I lost track of what I was reading.

The point of giving support is indeed getting the big picture, however it's like a store. The customer asks for something and how to get it to work, you simply provide the solution and let them be on their way. You don't butt into their business unless asked to, you know?

Also the part you said about using an .htaccess redirect, is not true.

Deprecated

By the way Threep, I wanted the .htaccess solution for my forum too, and I also wanted to learn how to do it, so I got it working and if you'd like to try it here's what you add to your .htaccess file to redirect yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com/forum/

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !forum/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /forum/$1 [R=301L]


You must have a "RewriteEngine on" directive before the code, often in the first line of your .htaccess file. Also remember to edit yourdomain to suit. You may be interested in reading the discussion about wwwRedirect for additional information.

I don't see any point in engaging in a debate about whether an HTML redirect or an .htaccess redirect is better, so I'll leave you to make up your mind and I'm outta here. Good luck!

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