White Screen on both frontend and backend

  • Resolved h1k1ngg1rl

    (@h1k1ngg1rl)


    7 years, 10 months ago

    Over the last several days, I was inundated with clients calling me to tell me their sites were down, (just a white screen on both frontend and backend).

    After going through each and every plugin on all of these sites, it was fairly obvious that the only constant was Wordfence, as they all used different sets of plugins, but each used Wordfence.

    Took me awhile to figure this out, but I found out doing the following resolved the issue:
    1. Via ftp, rename the Wordfence plugin folder to something different, like wordfence-disabled. You can find it at siteroot/wp-conent/plugins/wordfence. Site should now come back up and you should be able to login.
    2. Update WordPress, and any other plugins you have. Make sure all plugins are up to date, as well as all themes (and make sure you are using child themes).
    3. Via ftp again, rename the Wordfence plugin folder back to its original ‘wordfence’.
    4. Re-activate it if necessary. All should be good now.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • Plugin Author WFMattR

    (@wfmattr)

    Hi,

    Thanks for the notice. Do you happen to have the error log for any of the sites where this occurred, or do you know which outdated plugin caused it? If there is a particular type of conflict with another plugin, it’s possible we can prevent it in the future.

    -Matt R

    I had the same issue across 5 sites. In the end, deleting all wp_wf* tables from /var/lib/mysql/site_db/ allowed me to see the site and log in. However, at this point, all of the installs (after trying many different methods of removal) will not save and options changes, will not pull free API keys, and nag me with the “congratulations” pop up on every page load. I tried deactivate -> delete -> WF assistant remove everything -> restart mysql…no love (DB tables still physically present.

    Happy to provide what I can. I had to try and restore an older image of the box in an effort to get things back up quickly so I may not have logs for the original issue.

    • This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by jasongolod.
    Plugin Author WFMattR

    (@wfmattr)

    Hi @jasongolod,

    When the API key and options can’t be saved, and the tour window won’t go away, that generally means that Wordfence can’t write to the wp_wfConfig table. (Your prefix like “wp_” may be different).

    It could be because the table can’t be created, the database user doesn’t have privileges to write to or alter the structure of tables, or the tables are corrupted. You may be able to see the status of the user privileges and tables on the Diagnostics tab on the Tools page, on the Wordfence menu. (Diagnostics was a separate menu entry until 6.3.0, if you still have 6.2.10 installed.)

    -Matt R

    Matt,

    thanks for taking the time to respond. The tables all have the same permissions as all of the other tables and are recreated if I delete all of them on a “fresh” install.

    On the diagnostics screen, there is a red X for “Basic Config Writing” & “Serialized Config Writing”.

    There is also an error pop-up when I try to load the tools page:

    Could not load password audit jobs: Exception: WordFence API error: Your site did not send an API key when contacting the Wordfence servers. in /public/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/lib/wfAPI.php:60 Stack trace: #0 /public/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/lib/wordfenceClass.php(3950): wfAPI->call(‘password_load_j…’, Array, Array, true) #1 /public/wp-content/plugins/wordfence/lib/wordfenceClass.php(975): wordfence::ajax_passwdLoadJobs_callback() #2 /public/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(298): wordfence::ajaxReceiver(”) #3 /public/wp-includes/class-wp-hook.php(323): WP_Hook->apply_filters(”, Array) #4 /public/wp-includes/plugin.php(453): WP_Hook->do_action(Array) #5 /public/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php(91): do_action(‘wp_ajax_wordfen…’) #6 {main}

    Plugin Author WFMattR

    (@wfmattr)

    Hi @jasongolod,

    Sorry for the delayed response. The exception message and the red X’s for the two “config writing” tests are signs that the wfConfig table can’t be used properly. When you removed the tables manually, did you remove them within mysql/phpmyadmin, or by removing the files directly from /var/lib/mysql/site_db/ ? If they were removed from the folder, it’s possibly the table definitions still existed — in that case, removing those tables within mysql (the command line client) or phpmyadmin would probably be best, to get a clean start.

    If you did it that way already, can you try running the query describe wp_wfConfig ;? There should be three columns — if the third column “autoload” is missing, that would mean that the tables aren’t being re-created from scratch. That column was added a few months ago — on most sites, we used an ALTER command to add it, but if you’ve removed tables and reinstall the current version, that column is included when the table is created.

    -Matt R

    As i’m not a programmer. when i’ve running the query describe wp_wfConfig ; on putty.exe it’s display -bash: describe: command not found

    Please help.

    Updated – I’ve running the query on phpMyAdmin Query/ describe wp_wfConfig ; Submit Query. and it don’t display anything.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
  • The topic ‘White Screen on both frontend and backend’ is closed to new replies.