News:

SMF 2.1.4 has been released! Take it for a spin! Read more.

Main Menu

Links at 404 error

Started by Paffman, June 23, 2018, 06:37:05 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Paffman

Hi all,

Long story short, yesterday early hours I was made aware that my forum had issues. You could login to the home page, but any topic link clicked would bring up the 404 not found error. I asked my host to look into it (eUKhost) and 24 hours later the forum is working again at the expense of losing some links from the website that the forum is accessed from. Any tech heads out there can tell me in layman's terms what they mean please?

"While investigating this issue I found .htaccess at "/home/suffolkf/public_html/**************.co.uk" causing SMF forum issue to load the inner pages.

I have renamed .htaccess file to htaccess-bk at same location after which SMF forum inner pages started loading fine, Please confirm the same from the attached screenshot. However now menu at http://*******************.co.uk/ are now not working due to renaming the .htaccess file. It seems it is an issue with your .htaccess file to correct this issue please review the htaccess-bk file code and correct it from your end.
"

I have no idea what they are on about. Anyone heard of this issue before? I did think at one point that I was going to lose the forum.

What would my best course of action be now? (yes I do backup).

Thanks in advance.

Steve

Arantor

An .htaccess file can modify how Apache (the webserver) handles requests. It can stop requests being made, but more importantly in your case I think it can be used to handle redirections between what the URL is and what file it actually ends up with on the server.

Are you using WordPress? Or SMF with the Pretty URLs mod?

Paffman

Thanks for your reply.

The website is WordPress and there is a link to the SML forum. I am using Post name in permalinks.

Steve

Arantor

So you have WordPress at the top of the site and the forum in a folder underneath it?

When you say 'using the post name in permalinks', do you mean in WordPress or SMF?

(This would be easier if you'd posted links so I didnt have to guess how you'd configured it)

Paffman

Sorry as you can see, I do struggle with this...

This is the website, just a basic site as a platform to get to the main forum (now some pages won't work due to what the host has done) http://oilboilertechnicians.co.uk/

The link to the forum is here, but you won't see into it unless you login, if you need to login I can PM you a username and password.

http://oilboilertechnicians.co.uk/OBTForum/index.php

Arantor

OK, so I see what the problem is.

Firstly, your host has managed to break the links in your WordPress - the .htaccess file in this case was getting people from the link in the sidebar to the right actual files on the server. So, http://oilboilertechnicians.co.uk/us/ doesn't work right now because there isn't really a folder called 'us' on the server. .htaccess was just intercepting the request and funnelling it to WordPress.

Meanwhile, the menu bar used to list the link as http://oilboilertechnicians.co.uk/oil-boiler-technicians-forum/ which was the page you had that linked to the forum.

I suspect most of your issues would be fixed by putting the file called .htaccess back in all honesty - and if not, we can fix those as they get encountered.

Mind you, you have the misfortune to be using eUKHost - a firm I spent a great deal of time getting very fed up with because I used to work for a company that had maybe 30 dedicated servers with eUKHost who did very odd things to those poor servers and had some very interesting ideas about support, all of which were wrong and invariably just suggested rebooting the servers rather than actually knowing how to fix the problems.

Paffman

Thanks for taking the time to look at this issue. I have managed to fix the website menu by changing the permalinks in WordPress to plain from post name. I am surprised that you say that eUKhost are poor, I have been with them for several years and found them to be helpful and very contactable. Having said that I am getting more and more issues with them over the last few months. Things keep breaking and then I have to ask them to fix them.

This latest fiasco happened early one morning and I never did anything to break it. Also I keep getting messages about abuse reports from some company about a script that is running. I don't know how that gets on the server, I certainly didn't upload it, I suspect it gets in server side.

I design websites and use the Simvoly platform (getting away from WordPress) and the hosting is on Amazon servers, I have not had any issues with them as yet. Although I did ask if an SMF forum could be installed on there and I was told no. Where do you recommend for good hosting?

Arantor

I've just had a lot of terrible support from them, for overpriced, under-specification hardware, with recommendations that are less than helpful. In the end after seeing them change settings on servers (bear in mind, these were dedicated servers configured very specifically, they'd go and change things without being asked) I configured all the firewalls to keep them off the servers because their changes invariably broke things.

I usually recommend Gray Web Host for smaller sites, then something like Linode (unmanaged VPS) for medium size sites, and going to Amazon EC2 with ECS for huge sites.

Paffman

Thanks for your honest input. My white label web design business websites are hosted on Amazon, couldn't tell you what type of servers though.  :o

Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen

Wordpress and SMF can be a difficult combo sometimes, have you had any progress with this?
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

Advertisement: