Inundated with errors, other forums down, since 2.1.3

[rusbowden]

Hello Liver,

Thanks for opening those forums and displaying the problems there. I've spent a lot of time on the hooks problem and cleared them up. Babilu 3 was completely down at one time as I noted above. So headway is being made. And now we have to look at this other damage done.

Maybe, maybe so, that the faulty SMF updating which I did from the admin area is an isolated yet serious problem just within the SMF forum software. Maybe this hooks problem created in the updating had nothing to do with the other forums crashing. But if this turns out to be the case, the coincidence is extreme. I check all the forums more than twice each day. The Phorum software for cc and babilu went down at the same time the Vanilla software for the babilu2 went down. Just that is a crazy coincidence. Phorum has always been solid, up until that very day. At first babilu3 was down at the same time as the other forums. All this occurring while I was updating the SMF software, which was installing with errors that crashed Babilu 3. As I noted, I would have been better off hitting the lottery that day.

I spent the first 6 days with a  ticket open with A2hosting.com, and all indications point to the software code. Did something happen at A2Hosting, were they too suddenly making errors in my web site that day? Maybe.

Rus

[secretprojects]

Does the same user have rights to all the folders? This would be the case in a typical Apache or NGINX installation, i.e. apache running as www-data user has access to all folders).

If so, you could have a mod which screwed up codewise  and searched your other folders for files to modify and modified other files with a matching name that matched the search criteria - e.g. looking for a file called common.php and finding it in multiple forum folders and adding code or a a reference to something else that breaks those other forums.

This is potentially possible with PHP provided the user php runs as has rights to those other folders and someone screws up the search syntax.

[Kindred]

I am going to correct you once again.

I run several SMF installations plus several WordPress installation and half a dozen php or html sub-sites on my server. 

Assuming the SERVER is configured correctly, and you were installing SMF verified mod packages (mods from our mod site) - there is literally NO CHANCE that the installation of a mod or the upgrade to 2.1.3 caused your OTHER sites to go down. Period.
The fact that you keep trying to blame SMF for that is getting tired.

I am also getting tired of having to pull teeth to get specific information from you rather than generalities.

Here's how I understand the situation from the many attempts to get you to explain. Please confirm the statements and answer the queries with CLEAR TYPED LANGUAGE (not images).

THIS IS GOING TO IGNORE YOUR "OTHER" FORUM SITES, since they have absolutely nothing to do with the situation.

1- you upgraded to 2.1.3 from 2.1.2

query: You upgraded HOW? Did you use the patch through the package manager or did you upload a clean set of files using the large upgrade archive files?
query: Did you confirm that you system was working, as expected, after upgrading?


2- you updated mods.

query: why?
query: what mods, SPECIFICALLY, did you "update"?
query: how did you UPDATE mods?


3- at some point, you modified the SMF root index.php because you claim it was pointing to the wrong location for Settings.php. Line 47-48 of index.php should read as such. There is no reason that you should have to ever change this.

Code Select Expand

// Load the settings...
require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/Settings.php');

4- You said "the site when down when I was installing a mod"

query: SPECIFICALLY which mod were you installing that caused the site to go down?
query: What does "go down" mean? (you have indicated a number of various errors, but have yet to clearly explain what you did to cause those errors)

[rusbowden]

Hi Kindred,

I appreciate the earnestness with which you respond. But I must correct you. I have never blamed SMF. We, all of us here, don't yet know what caused all forums to go down at once. Yet, that's the very issue. From my point of view, that has to be the very issue, right?

The only thing we know is that all forums did go down, and just as you see when you (or any visitor) try to open the other forums, that's how Babilu 3 was, just after I clicked "install" within, once again, the admin area while installing the new version of, once again I believe it was Unread-Notifications-On-Title_v1.1.3. Note to open-minded investigators: Here I can note that 2.1.3 had already been what appeared to be successfully installed, but I did not realize babilu, cc, and babilu2 had gone down as well as babilu3 until later that hour. I can only vouch for babilu3 being down until A2hosting increase capacities, and I was left being "inundated with errors".

Suspicious, no? That all forums went down the very same day, and all while updating the SMF forum from the admin center of the SMF forum, all mods having been downloaded from the mod area and uploaded without being touched? Indeed, the crashing of all forums, did not take place until Unread-Notifications-On-Title_v1.1.3 had been uploaded via the admin center, and I was on the second "install" click, which completely shut Babilu 3 down.

If I were to go along with your train of thought, it would be like a detective simply going along with the husband saying that he did not shoot his wife for the life insurance money, with his own gun, with his fingerprints on it, even though it looks as if he was the only one in the house at that time of the murder. I appreciate your sticking up for SMF. And I have in the past. I very much like SMF. It suits our needs better than the others. My interest is only in resolving the issue.

Imagine what I would now be doing, if I believed for sure that all forums coincidentally went down at once? I would go to Phorum and say, "Hey, here's the issue that came up." And then to Vanilla and say the same thing. And you proposed that I go to the host, which I already have done. All because on the very same day, within an hour of each other, all forums went down. No forum was able to be visited.

All at once. Suspicious? Coincidence?

The Phorum software that we use for /babilu, has never failed this way from my memory, and it has been over a decade. We switched to Vanilla because there was a call for being better able to view the site in a cellphone. But in that software, like with SMF, the admin goes into a dashboard area to update. I cannot get into it. And if I were to overlay the software into what I have, and the site did not come back up, then I would not know anything. The site is now showing an extraordinary amount of errors, any or all of which might lead to further errors uncovered, which has already occurred after fiddling with the first one.

Your defense of SMF is admirable, but narrow in its logic, that you have not seen this happen before and do not understand how this could happen. But here we are. We are dealing with an extraordinary coincidence if you are right in your assertion. ANd bear in mind, that you being right only means you will have been a good prognosticator, but not that I will have been wrong. I cannot be a prognosticator, but must remain a detective and solve this serious issue. It is my responsibility.

Thanks again.

Rus

[Diego Andrés]

When you say "installing new version of Unread-Notifications-On-Title_v1.1.3", do you mean that you previously had this mod installed, uninstalled and then installed it again (the normal process)?

What is the "new update" that you saw? That mod last update was in February 2022, according to the change log, so did you first install it prior to February?

How did your files change so much, did you overwrite them at some point with other mods?
Kindred asked you some more questions but I don't see more information from you regarding those questions, could be useful.

[Doug Heffernan]

@rusbowden, I am going to be blunt here and I really hope that you don't mind. You have been asked on numerous occasions to provide detailed info, and yet you haven't done so. To be honest, you are being very vague, and the way that you describe the issues that you are having, and some of your claims, they just don't make much sense.

You will have to help us help you. Before you post any further, please take some time to read this topic.

https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=581245.msg4114478#msg4114478

[rusbowden]

Hi Diego,

I installed the Mod Version Checker on November 28. This showed me several mods that were outdated in Babilu 3. Unread-Notifications-On-Title_v1.1.3 was one of them. So yes, that was first installed prior to February 2022. I never overwrote them and never have. I go through the admin area to update.

Which question or questions of Kindred's are you referring to? I believe I answered each one. But the one maybe you want more info from is the matter of the Settings.php error. Before opening this discussion thread, in the 5 or so days before that, because one of the other forums was throwing out a missing Settings.php file, and that forum never had such a file, on the advice of A2hosting, I made a Settings.php file to mirror the one in babilu3 for I believe it was babilu2, could have been babilu. That did not work. Here is the message I got from A2Hosting:

We have checked the required details and can no longer see the missing settings.php error, but the webpage https://pochapocha.com/ was crashing due to a "Parse error" as shown below:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected token "/", expecting "," or ";" in /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/index.php on line 200

So I deleted the dummy Settings.php file. Then to see what might happen, I changed the index.php file to only look for the Settings.php file in babilu3. This got the forum beyond the Setting.php error, but it was obvious that this was not a fix. It was an exploration anyway, to further define what had happened. The index.php file was replaced before opening this discussion with you guys. It is the same one that was there also before February 2022.

But let's step back to Nov 29, when I received this message from A2hosting:

pochapocha.com is unable to load because it's missing a settings.php file unique to your forum software. If you'd like to avoid restoring everything, you could take a settings.php from /babilu3, and near the bottom of that file, fill out the database name and credentials, and the file paths so that it's configured properly. Otherwise I would recommend pushing these sites back with a restoration.

So this was our focus. We tried going back and using previous dates when the forums had been working, but to no avail. There is no such Settings.php file in the Phorum or Vanilla software, never was, nor was the problem occurring days before, as I already knew because as I said, I check all forums multiple times each day. In a nutshell, part of what we did, was back track to see if this had ever changed. No, it was always the way it now is for the other forums.

Thanks.

Rus

[rusbowden]

Hi Doug,

I hope the last post is sufficient. If there is more info that you believe you or Kindred asked for, please let me know. If you like, I can copy and paste the entire ticket from A2Hosting if you believe that will help.

Nothing I have said has been purposely vague. The conversation has been sidelined by premature assertions that this has nothing to do with SMF, rather than a focus on resolving the serious problem that I am faced with. I'd rather you take what has happened to my forums as feedback to improve SMF. We at least know that going through the admin center to update software causes an inundation of errors that need addressing. There may be yet more.

Rus

[Sir Osis of Liver]

I can only vouch for babilu3 being down until A2hosting increase capacities, and I was left being "inundated with errors".

This is interesting.  Did you at some point exceed your server resources?

pochapocha.com is unable to load because it's missing a settings.php file unique to your forum software. If you'd like to avoid restoring everything, you could take a settings.php from /babilu3, and near the bottom of that file, fill out the database name and credentials, and the file paths so that it's configured properly. Otherwise I would recommend pushing these sites back with a restoration.

This is nonsense.  Did you actually do it?  If so, what EXACTLY did you do?

The SMF forum is currently working fine for guest access, as it was last night.

[rusbowden]

Hi Liver,

The hosting company has not indicated that I exceeded resources and multiple tech service people have looked at this issue. That is indeed interesting, and has been at the back of my mind since they increase capacities, and I will ask. It is logical, because as the other forums are basically dormant, it could have been while working in the SMF admin area, that the updating and errors caused an overload. The question I have as I write, what has swayed me off that train of thought, is that all other forums are down. Why all of the others? And why is it only Babilu 3 that works each time now.

Yes, that suggestion that you highlighted in red was a long shot. By telephone the A2hosting guy said that would be the case, but what else did we have to get beyond the error? It was a let's-try-this, and a could-it-be-this-easy type of suggestion. It was from the very beginning that A2hosting was saying that the problem was beyond their purview, that I should ask SMF what's up with this.

What I did, was simply change all references in the SMF Settings.php file from babilu3 to babilu2 or babilu, whichever one was the guinea pig. That did not work as expected and gave no useful information, so while looking for easy long shots, I changed the index.php file to look for babilu3/Settings.php instead of Settings.php, which of course got beyond the error, and caused unhelpful errors to be thrown at the other sites.

Thanks much.

Rus

[Sir Osis of Liver]

Don't know anything about Vanilla or Phorum, but it's remotely possible that by crosslinking those directories from SMF Settings.php (a really bad idea), it triggered an error in the other forums, possibly to do with a cached file.  I would try clearing cache in the other forums, if that doesn't work, restore them from backup.  There's nothing you can do in SMF that will fix those forums.

You did clean up Settings.php?

[rusbowden]

Hi Liver,

Yes, I put the right Settings.php file back. I'll go forward with your suggestions. I've asked A2hosting.com about server resources.

Thanks.

Rus

[Kindred]

I'm not being narrowminded... I am not just defending smf because i work here
there is literally no way, on a decently configured host, for what you say to be caused by smf.
This is why I keep telling you to talk to your host..  because they only way for something to affect all directories would be for the host to have changed something (php version maybe) or for a really terrible configuration of the server.

At this point, your system is in a very screwed up state.
Soooooo....

Delete the Sources and Themes directories in the smf section.

Delete index.php in the root of smf.

Upload a fresh set of files from the large upgrade archive package.

Upload and Run repair_settings.php and remove all hooks.

Then try to use smf.

My suggestions for your other sites is to restore the file backup from whatever date you have BEFORE all of your problems.

And btw, you only partially answered my queries, in a long, rambling way, instead of concise, clear answers to very specific queries.

[rusbowden]

Hi Kindred,

Your logic was narrow, because you were only considering what came to mind from the code and your close usage of SMF, not from the extreme coincidences of what occurred. Being narrow minded is something else again. That's a personality trait, which I would not lay on you. Being biased for SMF is understandable, though. I've always liked it myself.

So, how did the system suddenly come into the screwed up state? That may be a very important question for all of SMF. Possibly not? Sure.

What you suggest for the other sites has already been done. It's part of the efforts from A2hosting first day, while on the phone. We only had to go back one day, but went further too. Following the fullest backup that could be done, I got this message from A2 technical service:

Thank you for your patience. The restoration is completed however, the site still shows a missing /home/wzzdbhie/public_html/Settings.php file error. I have checked older backups and they also do not contain the Settings.php file.

I recommend uploading a new Setting.php and reconfiguring it (such as database name, user, database password, and directories path) so that site could start to load properly.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at any time. We are here 24/7. We'll be glad to help!

This message was on November 29, the day after all forums went down, but after Babilu 3 was back up online. Issues did continue. For instance clicking on some member names, threads and topics resulted in the index.php file in public_html downloading. And also the inundation of error messages.

Thank you for your efforts and suggestions. Let me note again, this "very screwed up state" is what happened while updating SMF. There had never been any sign that such a screwed up state existed.

More logic. And for the sake of this argument, which is not an assertion, let's say this very screwed up state was caused by a hack. Just say. My question becomes, could the coders at SMF or any of its passionate 3rd parties, devise a way to hack a site and screw it up? Sure you could. Could it happen instead by a miscoding, or a misplacing of something in the update process within the SMF software? Sure it could. Did it? We don't know.

Right now, I am following up with the server resources idea. Let's see if it has been the problem all along. My fingers are crossed.

Rus

[Diego Andrés]

My question becomes, could the coders at SMF or any of its passionate 3rd parties, devise a way to hack a site and screw it up? Sure you could. Could it happen instead by a miscoding, or a misplacing of something in the update process within the SMF software? Sure it could. Did it? We don't know.

We actually know that this didn't happen, so even suggesting it is nonsense.

[rusbowden]

Hi Diego,

Do you have better explanation on why the coincidence? At this point all we are doing is brainstorming. How did updating the SMF forum screw up the other forums? Is it because of the server? Is it because of the process? Umm, was I hacked previously and this updating set it off?

Rus

[Steve]

How did updating the SMF forum screw up the other forums?

Not possible as has noted several times in this topic.

Is it because of the process?

Process of what? Updating? Again, not possible as noted above.

Umm, was I hacked previously and this updating set it off?

No. If you had been hacked previously your forums would have not run correctly.

If you are not willing to do as @Kindred suggested in his last post and you obviously haven't taken the time to read the topic at the link @Doug Heffernan posted then there's not much we can do for you. We're just going around in circles and I'll soon close this topic.

[Doug Heffernan]

More logic.

Nothing you have said is logical. Your ranting gets more and more incoherent.

And for the sake of this argument, which is not an assertion, let's say this very screwed up state was caused by a hack. Just say. My question becomes, could the coders at SMF or any of its passionate 3rd parties, devise a way to hack a site and screw it up? Sure you could. Could it happen instead by a miscoding, or a misplacing of something in the update process within the SMF software? Sure it could. Did it? We don't know.

Oh, but we do know. Every mod that gets submitted here is checked very thoroughly for security and bugs before being approved. We take security very seriously. What you are saying is so ridiculous and preposterous.

You are embarrassing yourself by stating things that are simply not possible such as when upgrading one forum, it screw up the other forums. Or Smf coders hack, miscode and misplace or some other nonsense like that.

Do not put yourself into debate spaces when you are not well educated enough on the subject to argue. Like that you show your ignorance. But again, if you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn

[Kindred]

Just to be clear -- my logic was not narrow. My logic is very clear and - in this case - the logic is linear.

I am considering what could have happened -- and what you keep trying to suggest LITERALLY CAN NOT HAPPEN with any code distributed on the SMF website (either neither updates or validated mods).

There is something very wrong with your server configuration -- and the fact that the HOST can't figure it out is very concerning, and I would consider moving hosts.
Neither vanilla nor phorum use Settings.php -- neither of those systems should be looking for that file. They each have their own configuration file needed to be included within their directory structure based on the root of their installation.
SMF does use Settings.php for configuration. Like the other systems, SMF requires that file to be in the SMF FORUM root directory, not the server web root.

The fact that you have some system looking for a Settings.php int he WEB ROOT, indicates that something is wrong. TRUE.
The fact that the file did not exist in any of your backups indicates that whatever is NOW wrong happened at some point recently. TRUE.
There is nothing that would cause a correctly configured system of ANY of those three softwares to do this.

Therefore, by logic, the ONLY thing that would cause this is a bad (very, very bad) configuration change to your software setup or your server setup.

Since you claim that everything worked and that you made no changes to your configurations - by logic, the only remaining possible cause is a sever change of some sort by the host.

[Sir Osis of Liver]

You've wasted a lot of time and bandwidth flogging the wrong end of the horse.  As far as I can see, there's nothing wrong with your SMF forum, everything I can access as guest works correctly.  Two of your crashed forums are displaying server errors related to calls and files in those forums' directories.  That's what you and your host should be addressing.  You haven't posted a lot of useful information, but unless your forums are sharing a database (did you ever answer that question?), there's no way the SMF upgrade could have affected your other forums.  The upgrader can only access files within the forum directory (it uses the paths in Settings.php), and only the database to which the forum is connected (also in Settings.php). 

I believe it's significant that all four forums went down together.  I think it's also significant that your host "increased capacities" after upgrade failed.  Doesn't inspire confidence that they made several ridiculous suggestions regarding crosslinking settings.  Just a theory, based on inadequate info, but it's possible that you were previously running at the limit of your server resources, and the upgrade attempt put you over the top.  Different hosts handle this differently, but it can result in an email notification that you've exceeded allocated resources, can cause scripts to fail, and at worst can have your account suspended.  Host support may have attempted to upgrade your account, and in doing so buggered your forums.  We've been able to get the SMF install running correctly in 2.1.3, the other forums must be fixed by you or your host.

If you have a decent hosting package, it should include full backups going back 30 days (my host uses Acronis).  You should be able to restore the entire account or any part of it to it's working state from before these problems occurred.  That's your best bet, then you can go forward from there.

And, no, the upgrade package wasn't "hacked".