Thread

Expression Engine v2.3.1 was recently installed on our Solaris 10 server.  The person who is developing a site with it reported that when she tries to publish an entry by cutting and pasting in text, she gets a blank screen. Safari actually displays a message indicating that the page cannot be opened “because the server unexpectedly dropped the connection.”  The Apache log file reports a bus error when this happens:

  child pid 2453 exit signal Bus error (10)

I have tried to replicate the problem.  Sometimes I can get a page to publish.  At first I thought the problem was related to the size of the entry.  I could get small entries to publish but if I pasted in a larger chunk of text, it would fail.  I thought it might be a memory problem with PHP (though in the past when that has been the case I’ve seen an error message to that effect) so I increased the memory_limit in php.ini from 128M to 512M and restarted the web server.  That had no noticeable effect.  By the way the version of PHP on this system is 5.2.17.  Other times I haven’t even been able to get a single sentence to publish.

We also have another instance of EE that has been running for some time on the same server (EE v2.2.2).  To my knowledge, the persons managing that site have not had this problem.

Any insight into this problem would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

-john

Hey John,

Sorry to see you are encountering this issue. When you say “Other times I haven’t even been able to get a single sentence to publish.” and “if I pasted in a larger chunk of text, it would fail.”, to me that sounds like there may be a word, or character in there that the server doesn’t like.

Can you narrow it down to see if a certain word or character is causing issues here? Perhaps a mod_security issue? Because if it publishes sometimes and not others, perhaps it’s based on the content of the entry.

Thanks.

Kyle,

Thanks for responding.  Your comment “sounds like there may be a word, or character in there that the server doesn’t like” is right on target.  It looks like the problem occurs whenever a post contains a non-ascii character (ex., accent marks, Microsoft Word curly quotes, etc…).  We had this problem last spring with our instance of EE v2.2.2 and a colleague found this post: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/193106/.  The solution back then was to change the character set in the ExpressionEngine config from ‘UTF-8’ to ‘utf-8’.  That’s why we didn’t experience this current problem with that version.  We applied the same “fix” to the 2.3.1 instance of EE and that appears to have solved our current problem as well.

I’m curious as to why this works since HTTP character sets are identified by case-insensitive tokens.

-john

John,

Glad to see you got this worked out with Kyle’s assistance. Is there anything else I can do to help?

Sean

John,

Glad to see you got this worked out with Kyle’s assistance. Is there anything else I can do to help?

Sean

Not unless you can you tell me why changing the character set in the ExpressionEngine config from ‘UTF-8’ to ‘utf-8’ solves this problem.  I’m also curious why the lower case version isn’t the default.

-john