News:

Want to get involved in developing SMF, then why not lend a hand on our github!

Main Menu

Empty settings files - all of a sudden

Started by maggymaesmith, February 22, 2021, 02:41:49 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

maggymaesmith

Forum has been running for years - keep it updated ... currently running 2.0.18 - moderator reported it was down - checked the files and the settings files were zero bytes.  What would cause this other than a hacker? I see no signs of files being changed other than the settings.

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

It's been a known issue for some time, that in certain conditions where SMF tries to write to the file multiple times in a row it can fail and wipe it clean.
As far as I know, it should be fixed for 2.1, somehow I thought that was the case for 2.0 as well though - but could be I'm mistaken.
This shouldn't happen often, and if it does then most likely you have an issue somewhere else with the server.
A workaround in that case would be to keep the settings.php file read only when you don't need to change it.
Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

shawnb61

Yeah, a fix went in for 2.0.18 and apparently it didn't work.

This should probably be moved to the bug board.

Internal issue #30 re-opened.
Address the process rather than the outcome.  Then, the outcome becomes more likely.   - Fripp

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Slava
Ukraini!


"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

How you can help SMF

maggymaesmith

Thank you for responding so quickly - I thought we were hacked but I couldn't see any other signs. I changed the  database username and password just in case.
I'll change it to read only. Good to know

live627

How active is your site (concurrent users)?

Advertisement: