Thread

Sooo.. I’m trying not to freak out, but… my entire site has gone blank—including the EE CP.This happened as I was uploading a few new image files via FTP.

All my files are still there (I can open image files, and static HTML files, but nothing related to EE), my database tables are all still there. I even used Dreamhost’s “rollback” feature to restore back to an earlier backup from 10 hours prior. This did not change anything. 

Googling around suggests it’s a possible PHP/MySQL error (or loop?) somewhere, though I don’t know how to verify or fix this. (Databases aren’t my area of expertise.)

When I set /system/expressionengine/index.php to “$debug = 1” I get the following message on my CP:

Warning: require(/images/captchas/wp-admin.jpg) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/xxxxxxxxxx/luclatulippe.com/system/expressionengine/config/config.php on line 2

Strangely enough, there is a file in /captchas/ named “wp-admin.jpg” but it’s just a broken graphic. Deleting it doesn’t help.

And sure enough, on my /config.php file, the three first lines look like this:

<?
require('/images/captchas/wp-admin.jpg');
?>

Deleting this line doesn’t help either. I get further PHP errors via the debug.

When checking the site via shell, any commands related to “mysqladmin” result in:

error: ‘Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2)’

Which means I can’t even check to see what MySQL processes are running.

I’m running EE 2.3.1
MySQL: Server version: 5.1.53

Thanks in advance for your help!

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. It’s been almost a full 24 hours that my entire site is still completely down, CMS and all.

You can mark this issue resolved. The problem? ONE single extra line-break of whitespace had been added on the first line of “database.php”. This caused the whole system to throw a spaz. (Ahem! This, I believe, is the technical term.)

I solved it by googling the error I was getting when deleting that weird extra line inserted into my config.php file:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /xxxxx/luclatulippe.com/system/expressionengine/config/database.php:2)

Meaning: “there’s problem on line #2 of database.php” When I compared that file to another site’s EE installation, I noticed the only difference was that mine (the one giving me the problem) had an extra line of blank space on line 1. When I deleted it, the entire site came back up.

Does anyone here know how that might have happened? I certainly wasn’t doing anything with that file when it happened. Is it possible to trace back how that may have occurred?

Luc,

Glad to see you found the answer. To find out why that file had an extra blank line I would ask your host if they could help. It is definitely very strange as you weren’t working on that file at the time the site went down.

Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Sean

Thanks Sean. The host is as confused as I am. I asked if logs might show what happened but haven’t heard back yet.

There is one question I have:
Now that this has happened and my EE’s system directory was shown publicly like this, should I change its name? And if so, are there any steps I should be aware of when doing this? Thanks!

Hello Luc,

Let us know what your hosting company reports back!

Do not worry about the paths being shown. There is nothing unique there and no information anyone can use to exploit your site.

Happy Friday!

Cheers,

Hello Luc,

I apologize, I was informed that you should take some precautions now that your file paths have been revealed.

You can follow the directions in the Post-Installation Best Practices¶ section of our User Guide. Let me know if you have any questions or need some help.

Again, sorry about being incorrect as to the best practice.

Cheers,

this just saved me - thought I was going insane. My site worked fine locally, moved to test and the thing collapsed in a heap.

Steven,

Glad to see this thread helped out. anything else I can do?

Sean