Random Access Forbidden Errors for Both Users and Admins

  • Resolved ajkessel

    (@ajkessel)


    9 years, 5 months ago

    Every few days, we get the standard “access forbidden” screen on our WordPress blog hosted a Debian system (Apache 2.4.10-10+deb8u3). This happens both to regular users and to admins. Sometimes when I’m in the middle of editing an entry, the interface will fail and I can’t save/update/etc; I believe this is the same issue.

    Restarting the browser always fixes the problem.

    Can anyone suggest a method to troubleshoot? Could this be something like premature cookie expiration? It’s happened to users on multiple platforms (Windows and OS X) so it’s not specific to any one user or OS.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

  • have you looked at the access go and error logs to see if something is showing up?
    are you the only one running on the server?
    Have you contacted your host to see if they have any ‘rules’ that could be causing this.

    you could also add

    define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);

    to your wp-config.php and see if anything shows on the screen when this happens.

    Thread Starter ajkessel

    (@ajkessel)

    Thanks for the tip. Turns out it was mod_evasive at fault; the default settings are too aggressive for normal WordPress use, especially as admin where you will have a lot of hits to the Apache server in a short period of time. Tuning down mod_evasive seems to have eliminated the problem.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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