Wordfence is causing problems

Hello jayhequet,
sorry I wasn’t able to reply sooner. After configuring the Firewall for the first time the Firewall goes in to Learning mode for a week. During this week it expects you to do all the things you do normally on your site and learn to NOT block those things. I’m wondering in your case maybe you didn’t do much on the site during that week and therefore the Firewall did not learn correctly?

Yes, I was busy and away from my websites for about a week.

It would have been valuable in saving time and frustration to have understood that this may cause problems if one was away from the websites.

Now that I have found this out the hard way, it sounds easy to identify as the problem. I am hoping there are no more surprising ones around the corner.

Thank you

Hi, I hope this is the right place to post as I am desperate for help.

I host 6 sites on ipage all with wordpress, I have wordFENCE installed on 5 all of which have “crashed”.

I have deactivated the plugin through Filezilla and now get this message when i go to the site

Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required ‘/hermes/bosweb25c/b1451/ipg.kitsonianscom/barnesbaker/wordfence-waf.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/local/lib/php-5.5.22-amd64/lib/php’) in Unknown on line 0

I cant access the wp-admin either (same message)

Can anybody help me regain access to my site?

Hello! owenkits,

I can imagine how you feel and I would love to help.

I have no experience with sites on ipage so this limits my scope here.

In my experience, it was on wordpress that I deactivated the file not on Filezilla. This may be the reason for the entire missing files.

I hope someone from wp can help. Please keep us posted too.

owenkits,
check .htaccess and user.ini in your root folder and remove any reference to “/hermes/bosweb25c/b1451/ipg.kitsonianscom/barnesbaker/wordfence-waf.php”.

Example user.ini

; Wordfence WAF
auto_prepend_file = '/public_html/wordfence-waf.php'
; END Wordfence WAF

Example .htaccess

# Wordfence WAF
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
	php_value auto_prepend_file '/public_html/wordfence-waf.php'
</IfModule>
</Files>

This (above) seems to be the general and simplest advice for overcoming this error:

Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required ‘/home/drdennis/public_html/herpesreliefcenter.com/wordfence-waf.php’ (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in Unknown on line 0

However, it also does not work for me. I have several sites that block my admin login due to this error. Removing Wordfence (by ftp) and replacing the .htaccess and .user.ini with the originals simply has not worked.

Any additional advice?

Thanks,
Dennis

Hello drdennisclark42,
is there a php.ini or something similar? If the definition is causing a fatal error the definition must be somewhere.

I just had the same problem and did a bit of research, following which I found a .user.ini file in the ROOT of the site, and renamed it to something not useful. The site works again.

Many sites I build do not get changed very often. They’re built on WordPress for its functionality, but don’t have active blogs or members logging in. A weeklong learning period for the WordFence Firewall is not likely to yield any useful information. Also, my own IP address changes, thanks to my ISP, if that is one of the things it “learns”. I think I shall not set up the firewall again if this is to be the result.

Hello,

I had some problematic issues with Wordfence on several websites which turn on my local server for development.
On my local machine, I use Wampserver for the development.

And now, since maybe one month, no one of my 6 websites turn on my local server. The problem => wordfence.

When I rename the plugin repository “C:\wamp\www\my_site\wp-content\plugins\wordfence” in “C:\wamp\www\my_site\wp-content\plugins\wordfence.OLD”, the site works again…

Thx for help

Greetings from France

Miki

Same here. I haven’t been able to use Wordfence on any of my 12 sites for he last 12 months, even internal development sites.
For some reason if Wordfence is activated, each site will not load.
As soon as I deactivate it, the site works.

Very disappointing as its the best out there.

holmpage,
if you recieved that error it means that the path to wordfence-waf.php was incorrect or the file wordfence-waf.php had been deleted. The Firewall works fine on most systems but of course there are exceptions and you do not have to use it if you don’t want to. What you are missing out on when you choose not to configure the Firewall is primarily the loading sequence of the Firewall. With extended protection the Firewall loads before any other code loads on your site and is thus able to intercept attacks before they have a chance to do damage.

mikitisma and muffintop,
We need more information to figure out what is causing your issues. Could you please start your own thread in the forum and provide some more details. For example, check your error logs and see if there are any clues there as to why your sites wouldn’t load. Thanks!

Will do…

My client’s site had been running OK with WordFence installed for a few years and all WP and WF updates have been done regularly. However recently, Wordfence seems to be causing problems. When I delete it and everything is works fine. But when I re-install and try to activate it, I get:
—-
An error occurred.

Sorry, the page you are looking for is currently unavailable.
Please try again later.

If you are the system administrator of this resource then you should check the error log for details.

Faithfully yours, OpenResty.
—-
I’d hate to leave the site up and running without WordFence but not sure what to do. What do I look for in the error log?
The site is maggiesmusic.com/maggiesblog and is hosted by Network Solutions.
Thanks for the help.

Hi Clickbert, you need to upgrade MySQL on your Network Solutions hosting account to a more recent version. You have MySQL 5.0 which is 12 years old and pretty buggy. You need to upgrade MySQL from version 5.0 to 5.6.

These instructions were sent to a customer from Network Solutions support:

* Log in to your Network Solutions Hosting Control Panel. Go to the Database Manager. Click on the large upgrade button under the MySQL version number. This will begin the update.
* You can then FTP to your hosting account and change the Wordfence.bak folder back to Wordfence.
* Please contact Network solutions support for further assistance.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 11 months ago by wfasa.

Thanks wfasa.