Thread

Hi everyone

I’m having some big issues with a few sites after a recent move from one Mediatemple DV Server (3.5) to another (DV4.0). I’m running several individual sites on various expression Engine 1.xxx builds.

All the content (including the EE databases) appears to have migrated across fine, but a number of my sites aren’t loading content from the databases properly, and are returning blank pages when I try to log in to the control panel.

On the following sites, you can see that the CSS and layout are loading okay from the EE Templates, but the actual content from the weblog entries is not loading. Additionally, when you login to the control panel, it just links through to a blank white page.
http://nickdarke.net
http://cscape.org.uk

On another site (http://attik.org.uk) the database appears to be loading correctly, but it’s adding strange PHPMyAdmin strings to all the links. When I click on one of the link buttons, instead of getting http://attik.org.uk/whatson
it returns http://attik.org.uk/whatson/?phpMyAdmin=135c4f55eebft6f62511b

I’m getting the same PHP string issue on this site: http://midnightdrives.co.uk/

Both these sites also link through to blank white pages after logging in to the control panel.

Does anyone have any idea what’s going on here, and how I can restore my sites to normal?!!! Please help!

Thanks

Oliver

Hello olivertomberry,

I am sorry to hear you are running into this problem. This sounds like a lot of stress.

What versions are we dealing with?

Did you run the Server Wizard on your new server?

Can use run a simple check on the database and do a connection test? Let’s make sure that the username and password are correct still.

Are all these sites on the same server?

How about file permissions and paths, have you double checked those?

This document might have a few good suggestions as well.

Let me know what you find and we can go from there.

Cheers,

Hi there Shane

Thanks for getting back to me. Here’s where I’m at.

1. The sites listed above have various builds of EE - ranging from 1.6.3 to 1.7.0.

2. The server test came back fine - http://cscape.org.uk/ee_wizard/index.php?wizard=run

3. All the sites are stored on the same Server (Mediatemple DV4.0, Shared IP 216.70.99.182)

4. File permissions seem to be correct (666 for config,php, config_bak.php, path.php - 777 for Upload folders and system/cache)

5. All the sites seem to be connecting to the databases okay, as they’re pulling the CSS/layout information out of one of the EE Templates. They also return a connection error once I change database settings in the config.php file.

6. I’ve tried importing the SQL dump into a new database and connecting to that instead, but no joy so far.

To recap - on two of the sites, there’s no content loading from the Weblog Entries (see http://nickdarke.net), suggesting the problem seems to be something to do with accessing the Weblog tables of the database.

On two of the others, it’s loading the Weblog content, but adding these odd PHPMyAdmin strings to the URLs (eg http://attik.org.uk/getinvolved/?phpMyAdmin=135c4f55eebft6f62511b rather than http://attik.org.uk/getinvolved).

Not sure if it’s a database problem, a server-side PHP problem, or an EE problem. Totally at a loss with how to proceed!

Cheers

Oliver

Just an update about the weird ?phpMyAdmin strings - these seem to be related to the database and Weblog entries problem as well, I think.

The site’s navigation links (eg on the left at http://attik.org.uk) all come from fields in a Weblog entry, and the database sees to be adding the same text string to the end of all these URLs.
?phpMyAdmin=135c4f55eebft6f62511b

No idea what this means!

Cheers

Oliver

Hi Oliver,

There is a lot going on here. To be honest, I think you may want to take this up with MediaTemple. They are awesome when it comes to supporting their users and they work very well with ExpressionEngine. This move has broken so many things I am not sure where to start, working with MT is going to get you a resolution very fast.

Does that sound like a good plan?

Let me know!

Thanks!

Hi Shane

Mediatemple were pretty useless actually - they just gave me a ‘this falls out of our support remit’ reply.

So basically I’m on my way to solving it solo - it looks like it’s something to do with the way data has been migrated over from Plesk 9 to Plesk 10.

The Clients/Customers structure is pretty different, and it looks like all the user permissions somehow got screwed up in the migration (I used Plesk’s inbuilt Migration Manager, which doesn’t look like it did a good job at all).

For future ref, if anyone else runs into this problem - either in a Plesk 9 to 10 migration, or a Media Temple DV3.5 to DV4 migration - the way I solved it on my problem domains was as follows:

1. In Plesk 10 on your new server, delete the Domain, Customers and Database created by the Migration Manager. Then install a new Customer and Domain from Scratch. In my case, I assigned the Default Domain Service Plan to the Domain and the Customer - I think this step granted the correct permissions to the site/database.

2. Update to the latest release of EE on your original server, then export database from your old EE site (I used MyPhpAdmin to create a Gzip file) and download all the content by FTP.

3. Create a brand new database on the new server, making sure you use the same database name, database user and database password as you used on your old site. Import it using PhpMyAdmin.

4. Then upload all your content to the new server. Make sure you check the File Permissions for system/cache, config.php and config_bak.php, and the various folders in Images/Uploads.

5. For me, that did the job.

Moral of the story: never trust a computer to do a job when you should really do yourself.

Cheers

Oliver

Hello olivertomberry,

I am really sorry to hear you were left to do this on your own. That does not sit well with me at all.

I cannot tell you how much I appreciate your detailing what you had to do to make this work. I am sure the community is going to need and love this information more than you probably know. I would love for you to post this in the Community Help Forum forum as a “how-to” if you are open to it.

Again, I am sorry to hear that you did not get support from MT.

Is there anything else I can do for you?

Thank you,

Hi Shane

Thanks for the kind words and your help in general with this

As suggested, I’ve posted my solution in the Community Forum and it can be viewed here. I hope people find it useful!
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/213355/

Onwards and upwards!

Oliver

Hey Oliver,

Glad to hear it. Good stuff for the community to have.

If there is anything else I can do for you, please feel free to open a new thread.

Have a great week.

Cheers,