DNHillson

Pinging the site won’t help, so you might as well stop doing it.

So I am an idiot then…
Ok, well I’ve let the host know about the problem I’m having, and we’ll see if anything comes of it.

check your site’s error logs (assuming you have access to them)

I have FTP access to the subdomain. Would I be able to find them that way? I don’t know much about this kind of stuff.

Are you running this server locally?

No, the hosting is provided by a member of the club – the site existed for years before I came along. I don’t know if he owns his own server, whether it’s real or virtual, or if he just has a paid hosting plan somewhere. I still haven’t received a response from him.

Well, it all sounds quite logical and correct to me.

Ok, but I pinged the server every half second until after the site broke again. None of the pings failed to come back, and none of them took longer than 400 ms. Should I try pinging more quickly if it may only be blinking out for less than a second?

If a drive is failing or if the drive is on the network and the network temporarily becomes inaccessible, then this can lead to directories “disappearing” for a short time on a unix-based machine.

How long would the drive have to be offline for? I pinged the host every second and then every half a second and waited for the error to occur again – no packets were lost and the longest one took < 400ms to come back. Then again, I don’t know if pinging is useful here. From what I understand, all these files would be on the same drive/machine, right? So for the themes folder to become inaccessible for a short while because the drive is blinking out, it should become inaccessible to me for a short period, right? Or am I an idiot?

Also, I’m pinging the host every second from now until after it resets again, then I’ll check the results for anything unusual.

Samuel Wood, I’ve forwarded your post to the server owner and asked him to verify normal function on his end.

This should not be marked as resolved. That was a mistake. Can a mod “un-resolve” this thread?

I made backups at the beginning, and I asked the server owner to back up the databases.

What should I have checked after each step? The site started displaying a php error when I started deleting files, and stopped when I was finished uploading all the new files. I checked to make sure the upload/download/delete occurred correctly if that’s what you mean. I’m not being sarcastic; I don’t know what you mean.

It just happened again. And when I login to the dashboard, I again see:
“ERROR: The themes directory is either empty or doesn’t exist. Please check your installation.”

linux4me2, perhaps that is it.

I clicked through the link you posted and reinstalled following those instructions religiously.

At the moment, I’m waiting to see if the problem occurs again; I’ll be sure to post if it does. Thanks.