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Internal Server Error - Increase in occurences

Started by rarach, February 22, 2009, 11:50:52 PM

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rarach

My forum has always had a tendency to show a few 500 internal server errors once and again, but now that we have upgraded to 2.0 it seems as if we are getting them almost every other page load. Is 2.0 the cause of this? I'm sorry if this sounds a bit dumb, but I'm in the process of learning how things work with our forum, as i'm the only tech savvy admin now. We also have been getting many errors in the error log, but I do not know what to do regarding those either.

I'm sure this is quite generic, but here is the error page we've been getting:
QuoteInternal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 Server at www.officiallost.com Port 80

Any advice as to what I should do is greatly appreciated. :)

LiroyvH

Do you get 1 or multiple "CORE" file(s) in your forum folder by any chance?
((U + C + I)x(10 − S)) / 20xAx1 / (1 − sin(F / 10))
President/CEO of Simple Machines - Server Manager
Please do not PM for support - anything else is usually OK.

rarach


LiroyvH

On FTP or a online file manager in your site's control panel. (So the control panel of your host)
Then look at the files in your forum folder :)
((U + C + I)x(10 − S)) / 20xAx1 / (1 − sin(F / 10))
President/CEO of Simple Machines - Server Manager
Please do not PM for support - anything else is usually OK.

karlbenson


rarach

Quote from: CoreISP on February 23, 2009, 01:56:52 PM
On FTP or a online file manager in your site's control panel. (So the control panel of your host)
Then look at the files in your forum folder :)

I guess I'm just not really sure what I'm supposed to be looking for on there. >.<
What's a core file?

Quote from: regularexpression on February 23, 2009, 02:43:17 PM
What mods are you using?

users online today, youtube bbc, topic solved, and nneonneo's AJAX ShoutBox.
I don't know if other things are still in there, since I didn't know I was supposed to get rid of old mods when we upgraded to 2.0.


JimM

Who are you hosted with?  Sometimes the internal server errors come from file permissions set to 777 and the host only allows 755 or 775. 
Jim "JimM" Moore
Former Support Specialist

rarach


JimM

Did you try checking your file permissions?  If they are set to 777, change to 755 and see if the errors go away.  If you are having other errors show in the forum error log, post them so we can figure out what is causing them.
Jim "JimM" Moore
Former Support Specialist

rarach

I tried changing the permissions, and it did not do anything. The frequency of internal server errors varies, but for the past couple minutes I can't even get onto my forum due to these ISE's. This is very frustrating, and I don't have enough knowledge to fix this. :(


Sarge

If you need to change permissions, you have to do it recursively, i.e. not just in the base forum directory but also in the subdirectories. You can do that from Filezilla (a popular FTP client), for example.

You can also reset permissions from SMF Admin > Packages > Options, if you can get there; select "Only the standard files are writable." and click the button "Change file permissions".

Do you have cPanel access in your hosting account? You should be able to download the raw Apache error log (the last 300 lines, I believe), if your host has allowed it:
http://www.cpanel.net/docs/whm/Download_a_Raw_Apache_Log.htm

After downloading it, open it in a good text editor, preferrably one that supports large files, and look at the last 50 or so messages. If you see anything suspicious there, post it here. (I would advise masking the path info, like /home/your_account_name/ and any other sensitive information beforehand.)

    Please do not PM me with support requests unless I invite you to.

http://www.zeriyt.com/   ~   http://www.galeriashqiptare.net/


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<H> I had zero posts when I started posting

damnitmike

I'm paying attention to this also.....I am getting them all of a sudden.....Error logs have alot of robots.txt in them, and I have no robots.txt.

File permissions are all 755

Core files......not sure exactly what your asking.....You will have to dumb it down alittle for me.....Thanks!

I get them when (when I do get them) , when I tried to modify a forum (sometimes a category), or install a mod. Those are the only times.

I'm thinking on 1 mod install, when it errored, I hit the BACK button, tried to install again, and it worked...

So I figured maybe that buggered something....I replace several files with backups, and it now does it rarely......

Hope this helps. ;D

damnitmike

Upon further review, yes, there were 4 core files. ;D

Sarge

Create an empty robots.txt file, place it at the root directory of your site and verify that you can access it at http://www.example.com/robots.txt (replace example.com with your domain, of course).

Also create a valid favicon.ico file and place it at the root directory too. These two simple things might reduce the number of useless errors that gather dust in your webserver's error log.

How is it going now? Are you still getting "Internal Server Error" pages?

    Please do not PM me with support requests unless I invite you to.

http://www.zeriyt.com/   ~   http://www.galeriashqiptare.net/


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<H> I had zero posts when I started posting

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