Thread

In a nutshell, my server load began surging and remaining very high.  It was EXIM.  I shut down EXIM and server load went back to normal.  I suspected the server had been compromised.  While walking through with someone familiar with security, we disabled open directory access (which I am told is a crucial setting to be disabled for any secure environment).  Upon doing so, my main site for multi-site manager continued to work while other sites did not; this message appears rather than the website:

The system path does not appear to be set correctly. Please open your path.php file and correct the path.

I opened the config file and the sys_path line refernced the folder but had no path before it.  I started experimenting but the most I was able to do was add the complete path.  Only the following worked to keep my main site up but I still have all of the other sites down:
/home/mysite/public_html/myadminfolder

Previously I just had:
./myadminfolder

Any ideas on how I can fix this?

If your sites went down after disabling open directory access then I would reverse that change as well as the path changes.  If your sites go back up then explain the steps you took to disable the open directory access.

I’m assuming by open directory access you mean the ability for people to browse your directories and see the available files.  Generally you should disable this but I’m not sure I would call it a crucial security setting.  ExpressionEngine adds index.html files to all of the EE directories so that people cannot browse those directories regardless of the setting.

The index.php in the subsites must be able to access the system folder.  If your restrictions don’t allow it, it won’t work.  Note the requirement:

If using sub-domains or domains, directories must be able to access your main installation system directory. Please see Setup Domains and Sub-domains for more information.

The domain/subdomain section goes into a bit more detail:

The directory you specify must be able to have files within it be able to access your main installation system directory. You should ensure you don’t have any “open_basedir” or other restrictions in place which could prevent this.

Odds are very good that’s what you’re running into.  I’d talk to your security guy about tweaking the server settings so that it’s both secure and the subsites can access the system files.  It’s doable- but I’m not up on server setup.

Make sense what’s going on?