BLANK pages??

[nocturne]

ok, so i went and did the installation, and i created the mysql directories...
but now, after i finish, all i get is a blank page... both the index and the serendipity_admin file... whats going on? how do i fix this???? please let me know soon, thank you

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Please check your Apache and PHP error logfiles.

Blank pages usually mean Fatal PHP errors or coredumps.

HTH,
Garvin

[nocturne]

i'm not sure how to check these...

will i need to reinstall this again?

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Reinstalling will always lead to the same error

If you are not sure where to find your error logfiles, please contact your system administrator. Also your PHP error logfile location should be contained in the phpinfo(); output!

HTH,
Garvin

[dougl]

I am part of the support team at the web hosting company where nocturne has an account. I have checked the Apache error log but nothing is being reported. I have checked the file permissions and corrected some of them but I'm still getting a blank page. Here are the files:

Code: Select all

drwx---rwx    2 pboyd    users           6 Sep 12 09:36 archives
drwx---r-x   11 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:27 bundled-libs
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users        6823 Sep 12 03:32 comment.php
drwx---r-x    5 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:32 deployment
drwx---r-x    2 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:32 docs
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users        1530 Sep 12 03:32 exit.php
-rw----r--    1 pboyd    users         351 Sep 12 13:29 .htaccess
drwx---r-x    7 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:35 htmlarea
drwx---r-x    5 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:36 include
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users       19644 Sep 12 18:15 index.php
drwx---r-x    3 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:38 lang
drwx---r-x   32 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:25 plugins
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users        8496 Sep 12 03:48 rss.php
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users       14484 Sep 12 03:48 serendipity_admin_image_selector.php
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users       16277 Sep 12 03:48 serendipity_admin.php
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users       11645 Sep 12 03:48 serendipity_config.inc.php
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users         588 Sep 12 13:29 serendipity_config_local.inc.php
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users        2151 Sep 12 03:48 serendipity.css.php
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users         589 Sep 12 03:48 serendipity_define.js.php
-rw-r--r--    1 pboyd    users        8659 Sep 12 03:48 serendipity_editor.js
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users         413 Sep 12 03:48 serendipity_xmlrpc.php
drwx---r-x    2 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:49 sql
drwx---r-x   24 pboyd    users        4096 Sep 12 03:51 templates
drwx---rwx    2 pboyd    users          19 Sep 12 03:53 templates_c
drwx---rwx    2 pboyd    users          19 Sep 12 03:53 uploads
-rwx---r-x    1 pboyd    users        1468 Sep 12 03:53 wfwcomment.php

Note: We do not allow file permission of 777 since that would allow other customers to write to the files. 707 is the maximum allowed and it would be sufficient for anything that needs to be done.

I have verified the MySQL configuration information in the "serendipity_config_local.inc.php" file. I've also tried executing the "index.php" file from the unix command line but it does not output anything.

We're running PHP Version 4.4.4, MySQL version 3.23.58.

Can you provide some additional troubleshooting tips?

Thanks,
-dougl

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Thanks for getting in direct touch with me; I believe this is the fastest way.

707 permissions should be no problem, as long as the webserver user is also "pboyd". If the webserver runs as "nobody" it would mean, that the webserver has no write privileges to the folder. Serendipity needs to have write privileges on at least the .htaccess and templates_c/ directory.

Speaking of which: Does an .htaccess file exist? If yes, did you try to temporarily remove it to see if it then works?

My suggestion is to change the VHost setting or php.ini and set display_errors to either On, or set the error_log to a file which you can then check. Most probably, PHP dies with a Fatal Error that it cannot read/write a file, but because error display seems to be surpressed in your environment, you can't see that message.

HTH,
Garvin

[dougl]

The webserver runs as "nobody" but I did grant 707 permissions on the archives, templates_c and uploads directories which would allow the web server process to write to those.

Yes, the .htaccess file did exist. I just tried removing it and that didn't help.

I'll see if I can turn on errors.

If you have any other suggestions, that would be great!

-dougl

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Hm, I'm sorry - but turning on the error display is currently the only option that I see left. I'm quite sure there must be a PHP error in there.

Best regards,
Garvin

[dougl]

I've tried both of the following:

1. adding the following to the .htaccess file

php_flag display_errors on
php_flag display_startup_errors on

2. enabling PHP error logging to a file

Neither option gave me any error messages for this Serendipity installation. I tossed in a simple PHP script with a syntax error just to make sure I was able to get error messages and that worked:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PRINT in /usr/home/pboyd/public_html/www.nocturne6.com/cultura/serendipity/test.php on line 8

Maybe I should re-install Serendipity from scratch?

Here's our phpinfo output just in case there's something else wrong here:

http://www.nocturne6.com/cultura/serend ... hpinfo.php

-dougl

[nocturne]

Ay,... why does stuff like this always happen to me?
thank you dougl for your continuing effort

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Okay, this is quite strange. The error display is now enabled properly, so PHP errors SHOULD be displayed.

Can you check if files in the templates_c/ directory get created?

Might I ask you if I could get temporary FTP access to the serendipity directory? Then I would love to just insert some die('debug') messages into the index.php to see, if PHP at least starts to parse the file, and then check if there is some offending line that makes PHP die. If you would want that, please contact me via PM so that we can get together.

Did you look into your syslog to see if the PHP processes maybe throw a coredump? Coredumping is the last reason I can imagine a blank page being printed. And coredumps should show up in the syslog (many times they do not appear in the Apache Error log)...

Best regards,
Garvin

[dougl]

I do not see any files in the "templates_c" directory (other than the .empty file).

I've checked logs and don't see any entries. I think that generally speaking, we don't log PHP errors.

I will PM you with FTP details.

Thanks for your help!

-dougl

[dougl]

Oh, and let me know if you want me to post our php.ini file contents.

-dougl

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I debugged the serendipity flow and found out that the actual error happened in include/lang.inc.php. This file uses an "@include" instruction to conditionally include language files, which will surpress PHP error messages in the PHP display. So only if error_logging to file were enabled one could spot a possible error.

Thus I removed the "@" and looked "behind the scenes". It was telling me of a PHP parse error in line 791 of the file lang/UTF-8/serendipity_lang_en.inc.php. Sure enough I opened that file and found out that it simply stops in the middle. This might be due to a bad FTP upload or file corruption - the file as it looks now is not the one delievered with serendipity versions.

So the solution would be to re-upload the whole lang/ directory from a serendipity release file to fix that buggy file, and then all should be well. I did not restore that file myself, so that you could have a look at it first on your own, if you like.

Best regards,
Garvin