Internal server 500 error on Index page

  • Hello,

    I host my wordpress install out of my house, and just today I discovered that the index page of my site and some other key pages are not getting served. the wordpress version is 2.7.1 i believe.

    The odd thing is I host a lot of other flat files and things from the same machine, as well as a virtual host of another wordpress blog. The other blog, https://domestickate.com loads just fine, no issues whatsoever. However, the blog https://mycomputerninja.com does not load.

    The tricky thing is I have not changed anything in nearly a month. My last blog post was probably 3 weeks ago, and aside from the 4 times a week backup, I havent even touched the server asside from ssh logging in and out once in a while to copy files.

    The troubleshooting i have done so far is to do a wget on the domain name which returned:

    –23:38:13– https://mycomputerninja.com/
    => `index.html’
    Resolving mycomputerninja.com… 98.245.152.86
    Connecting to mycomputerninja.com|98.245.152.86|:80… connected.
    HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 500 Internal Server Error
    23:38:14 ERROR 500: Internal Server Error.

    On further inspection, I cranked up the logging on my MCN virtual host to emerg and the only output that looked abnormal was this:

    127.0.0.1 – – [01/Sep/2009:23:41:15 -0600] “OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0” 200 – “-” “Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7 with Suhosin-Patch (internal dummy connection)”
    127.0.0.1 – – [01/Sep/2009:23:41:15 -0600] “OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0” 200 – “-” “Apache/2.2.8 (Ubuntu) PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5.7 with Suhosin-Patch (internal dummy connection)”
    98.245.152.86 – – [01/Sep/2009:23:41:33 -0600] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 500 – “-” “Wget/1.10.2”

    the last line shows the wget retrieve attempt, and all I get is a 500 error. It seems to have a lot of those “internal dummy connection” messages, like the server is being DOS’d from the inside, but that doesnt make sense because any other page, including php pages served from the site work just fine.

    I have tested other basic php pages, and they seem to come back fine.. i did the phpinfo() test in the MCN server root directory and it returned just fine and the permissions matched that of my index.php wordpress page. I also can retrieve a jpg residing in the MCN server root without issue.

    I have looked into the .htaccess situation, but i do not have an .htaccess file anywhere in the file structure in the root of the server, so i assume that not having one would imply that ownership and file permissions will govern the rest of the files access.

    as far as plugins go, i AM running a pretty old version of wpcache and a couple other legacy plugins, but all have been in use for more than 2 months on 2.7.1 with no observable issue on my end.

    another curious thing is that trying to just go to https://mycomputerninja.com doesnt pop up a 500 error or anything. you just get a blank page and nothing else. the only way i saw the 500 error was through wget.

    as a final note, i too have been getting quite a few spam users creating accounts on my site over the past week or so. usually that is a sign for me to upgrade to the latest wordpress version and delete those users, all of which i did. Today, despite the server giving the 500 error, i did a manual upgrade of the wordpress files to see if the overwriting of all the files would correct it in case someone managed to hack the site, but it only did the same exact thing.

    I am pretty much at a loss as to where to go next on this one. I have lots of backups already burned to a DVD for nearly a 4 month period on my server, so i am not really worried about loseing data or anything like that, but i really would like to not have to take drastic measures to get things working again.

    Let me know if you have any thoughts on where i can look next to figure out what might be going on.

    Thanks in advance.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Thread Starter sanimalp

    (@sanimalp)

    wow. so after all that, i simply ripped out all the plugins from my plugin directory in a last ditch attempt at getting the page to work, and guess what. It started working again.

    I feel pretty embarrassed about this, but its not surprising that my 3 generations old plugins were causing the issue in some way. I will try to get to the bottom of this issue and post up here what exact plugin and version of the plugin caused the issue.

    Thread Starter sanimalp

    (@sanimalp)

    well, i went through and redid all my plugins, and upgraded nearly all of them. I think the moral of this story is to make sure your plugins are updated.

    As a side note, i also discovered that someone was able to change the “permalink” interface settings, and they modified it attempting to do a javascript eval in line with the page load. i think that may also have been responsible for breaking the page, but who knows. it is gone now and i deleted it with extreme prejudice without thought for preserving it as an example of malicious code running around as of WP 2.7.1.

    all the junk i could find has been removed. Everything seems to be back to normal.

    hi guys i need urgent help. i am a new person to web creation and i have no knowledge. i was excited creating the website. everything went well. then i wanted to create a page that will not appear in my primary website but can be used as a seperate website. my original website is https://www.simplehealthtips.net and what i wanted is https://www.simplehealthtips.net/thankyou – for my autoresponder. what i did is i added new page and then went to settings-general and changed the url to simplehealthtips.net/thankyou. then it crashed the error message appeared as follows

    The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
    Please contact the server administrator, [email protected] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
    More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
    Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
    please walk me through step by step how to fix it since as you can see i am not a genius

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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