White screen when attempting to access ANY admin function.

Started by PanicRev, April 10, 2018, 07:29:44 PM

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PanicRev

Hi all... attempting to help a friend with his SMF install (SMF 2.0.13).

Symptom:
Forums are working as expected, except when an admin attempts to visit ANY admin page.  (Admin, Manage Packages, Error Log, etc.) it results in a white screen of death (HTTP 500). 

Potential issue:
Forum owner states that he attempted to install a plugin and it failed.  (It was an automatic image rotator).  There was a rollback done on the webhosting provider (A2 Hosting), along with a database rollback, and I've looked through the installation process for the plugin in concern and have verified that all changes were rolled back.  (No modifications left over in Sources / Themes, database, etc.).  This may or may not be related as admin issues may have existed before this, but it's the most recent change he had made.

What I've tried so far:
I stumbed across this post which seems to fit the issue, but the link seems old and it points to a "wiki" which has been deleted. https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=502354.msg3531364#msg3531364.

Regardless though, as suggested in that forum, I've added a directive in .htaccess to bump up the PHP memory limit to what A2 allows (128MB), but no fix.

Since I cannot read the error log via the ADMIN interface, I looked at the log_error table in the database and didn't see anything that stood out as related.  The hosts Error Log (at least what's visible to us via CPanel) didn't show any smoking guns either.  (a few missing favicons and other small issues).

I'm at a loss here as to where to start.  Since we cannot get into ADMIN, we can't start removing plugins... Is there any tools that exist out there that check the integrity of core SMF files?

Thanks so much!

Bigguy

Not sayin this will work but have you run this. Also, The owner should update his install of SMF if in fact it is sitting at that version.

What is repair_settings.php?

Kindred

The wiki was moved without adding a redirect...
https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/What_the_white_screen_of_death_means

the WSoD is a server side error. Your host should be able to help figure out what is triggering it...   look for an error.log, errorlog or some similarly named file..
Слaва
Украинi

Please do not PM, IM or Email me with support questions.  You will get better and faster responses in the support boards.  Thank you.

"Loki is not evil, although he is certainly not a force for good. Loki is... complicated."

PanicRev

Just wanted to say thanks for the help and post my solution in hopes that it might help someone else down the road.

I was able to solve the issue with the help of that relocated wiki.  Specifically the part where it turns on the error_reporting inside of the index.php file.

My best guess is that during the server rollback a file was corrupted and SMF was giving a parse error reading it.  I replaced that file with one from a previous backup and that did the trick.

I'll pass the recommendation along to the board owner that he should upgrade/update SMF to the latest version.

Thanks again for your help!

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