Thread

Our site’s home page is showing the 404 page. However, every other page on the site is working properly. (Only pages with EE “query strings” are working).

We are running EE 1.6.9 on IIS w/ ISAPI_Rewrite removing “index.php” from the URL string.

Here are some things we have eliminated:

~IIS is serving the “index.php” page properly (the 404 is generated by EE)
~All file permissions are set correctly
~When the ISAPI_Rewrite file is removed, the 404 page still shows
~When we made the index template in another template group the site’s home page, we still got the 404 page
~The home page shows perfectly via the /site/ URL

Please list several things that could cause this to happen so I can troubleshoot.

Thanks!

Hi ssebner, you’ll need to force query strings with IIS. If you were to remove index.php, make sure you remove index.php?

Notice the question mark following.

For information of forcing query strings see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FqPdUJL91E

Does that help?

That did not help. If you would please list several things for me to try, then I could troubleshoot multiple issues to get this thing back online before the long weekend.

BTW- The site has been working fine for the past 12 months, and all of the ISAPI_Rewrite, path, index, config, and other system files are identical to the ones we have in SVN. However, I replaced them anyway with the SVN copies and had our IT department confirm the permissions, but the home page still shows a 404.

Where is the code (or database information) that tells EE to display the site/index (or other) template for the home page?

Are you attempting to remove index.php? using your ISAPI rewrites?  If you manually put in an index.php?  in the appropriate part of your path, does that work?

Sue, thanks so much for the quick responses!

<< Are you attempting to remove index.php? using your ISAPI rewrites? >>
Yes- The site has been working fine for the past 12 months (and we are removing the “?”).

<< If you manually put in an index.php? in the appropriate part of your path, does that work? >>
No- And when the ISAPI_Rewrite file is removed, the 404 page still shows.

Hi, ssebner -

If you open up the root index.php, and look for qtype= - what value do you see there?  You might try playing around with that setting and seeing if that helps get you further.

You will need to change that in conjunction with including the question mark.

Please let us know what you find out!

$qtype was set to 0, $qtype = 1 had no effect, and $qtype = 2 broke every link in the site.

I tried /, /index.php. and /index.php? with all settings, but the home page still shows the 404 page.

I also tried this when the ISAPI_Rewrite file was removed with the same results.

BTW- We also have a second site running with MSM on the same server, and we did a DNS change on that second site the same day the 404 page began showing on our first site. However, both sites were working fine before the DNS change, and the second site is still working fine.

Where is the code (or database information) that tells EE to display the site/index (or other) template for the home page?

Hi, ssebner -

The best way to set that is to edit the template group, and click the checkmark to make that group’s index the default page.

Thanks, Lisa, but I guess I already tried that…

<< When we made the index template in another template group the site’s home page, we still got the 404 page. >>

Because we still get the 404 page when we changed to another template group, I would like to check the database (or code) to see if something got changed.

Can you point me to the actual place in the database (or code) that tells EE to display the site/index (or other) template for the home page?

It is in exp_template_groups in the column ‘is_site_default’ =)

Well, that looks good- any other ideas for what could be causing this problem? Do you think the DNS change had anything to do with it (or anything with our second site)?