Topic: Internal Server Error 500

[Cermno1981]

Hello,

A friend who was on SMF 1.1.13 with SP 2.3.3 wants to take advantage of the WYSIWYG editor in SMF2, however I cannot for the life of me actually get SP to install once upgraded to SMF2 RC5.

The problem appears to be that when I download the SP mod and install it, it's changing the CHMOD permissions on it's root to 0777 which is causing my host to throw out an Internal Server Error.

This copy of SMF is not installed in the actual root but in a sub directory, as follows; /home/myhosting/public_html/TLDR, and it is the TLDR directory that is being changed.

Any clue how I can bypass this error?

I found another thread here, http://simpleportal.net/index.php?topic=4806.0, but this has not helped.

Thanks

C

[AngelinaBelle]

Sometimes, on some servers (like at 1and1, for example), SMF's "CHMOD" does something we don't actually want it to do -- like doing the CHMOD all the way up at the root, instead of just in the forum.
 
Sometimes, this happens because we have supplied the wrong path to forum root in the FTP information (http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/What_is_the_local_path_to_SMF%3F)
 
In any case, you should be able to connect to your server via FTP and CHMOD manually.
If you are using a windows-based FTP client, you will probably be able to right-click on the files to change their properties.

[Cermno1981]

Thanks Angelina

I think in this case it was the former, it was CHMOD'ing all the way up to and including the root.

I downloaded the entire site to my home web server, applied the modification and re-uploaded it back to the web. I could not face doing anything manually.

Marking as solved.

[AngelinaBelle]

I am glad you were able to solve the problem.


If this should happen to you again, it should be an easy matter to fix the CHMOD.
Some of the free FTP clients make it easy to re-CHMOD selected files, including a whole directory full of files.


I'm glad it is working.

[AngelinaBelle]

Update:
I think I have experienced the same problem, on 1and1.
The problem does not seem to be related to SimplePortal.

It is a mysterious problem within SMF's package manager.
There is absolutely no reason why it should be doing its chmod anywhere but in the forum directory. It certainly shouldn't chmod up to the ftp login directory, if the forum is in a subdirectory.
I've asked about this one at simplemachines.org
It will be difficult to track down, unless we can get someone with an 1&1 account to allow us to play, knowing full well that we'll be bringing the whole site down with 500 errors each time we do this.

Any takers?

[chaos945]

I have a namecheap account that is experiencing this problem I would be willing to let someone test on.... if I try to install a package with the SMF manager I get 500 errors...

[AngelinaBelle]

Thanks for the offer. The lead dev is looking into possible causes for this problem right now.
So I've let everyone know you are willing.
-----
edit: removed a bad link

[simondale]

I had this same thing yesterday.

I was experimenting in a subfolder/ subdomain and it took down my main website and main forum.  I presumed those problems were unrelated and contacted my host (TSOHost) who fixed it.  Then I ran it again and the same thing happened.

Now I'm trying to do it manually but the list of files provided to CHMOD seems to be truncated:


The following files need to made writable to continue installation:

    /home
    /home/bfpvmfa/public_html/forum/Themes/classic/images/sp
    /home
    /home/bfpvmfa/public_html/forum/Themes/babylon/images/sp
    /home
    /home/bfpvmfa/public_html/forum/Themes/classic/images/admin
    /home
    /home/bfpvmfa/public_html/forum/Themes/babylon/images/admin

The "images/sp" seems to be truncated and is ambiguous when I look at the FTP.  Is this list somewhere else perhaps?

Thanks

Simon

[simondale]

I fixed my problem by deleting two themes which had screwed up paths, then the install worked properly.

Thanks

Simon

[AngelinaBelle]

That's interesting.  SMF got confused by bad theme paths?

That sort of thing can happen if
1) You copy files & database from one forum installation to another, but don't fix the theme paths.  The theme path points to the themes directory for the FIRST forum (since that's what is in the database)

2) You delete or rename themes, but don't tell SMF about the change.

As far as I know, the "500 error" problem happened to me even though I did not have this problem.  I think.

In any case, I believe the SMF devs have looked into this, and were working on a patch.  I am not certain if they have fixed this in the most recent version (2.0.2) of SMF.