500 Server Error before doing anything

theseum · Post by **theseum** » Tue Oct 10, 2006 11:20 pm

Hi! I downloaded the 1.0.1 to do a clean install. At first the installer worked correctly, giving me the "fatal errors" screen instructing me to fix the permissions on certain files. (The zip file didn't include the /archives folder, so I created it.) With the permissions fixed, though, I just get "500 server error" when I try to go to index.php. There is no .htaccess file so I can't delete it.

Can anybody help? Thanks!

azel · Post by **azel** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 3:41 am

Sometimes the .htaccess file is hidden, but can be accessed by your FTP client by enabling server-side filtering (the command is usually -a). If you can access this in your FTP client, you should be able to delete your .htaccess. Perhaps your provider does not allow .htaccess files?

theseum · Post by **theseum** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 5:10 am

I can view other .hidden files , is .htaccess hidden some other way?

as far as I know, the provider doesn't allow such files... if they don't, am I just out of luck?

edit: I just created my own .htaccess file without any problems... so I guess that isn't it...

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 10:07 am

Hi!

Can you look up your Apache and PHP error logs to see why you get a 500 error? It can depend on your server setup, maybe it does not allow any PHP header() calls; you could edit your index.php to temporarily remove all header() calls there (or put a "#" in front of it)?

Best regards,
Garvin

theseum · Post by **theseum** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 7:44 pm

the only log file I've been able to find is useless, it just says something like:

165.82.80.42 - - [11/Oct/2006:11:13:29 +0800] "GET /XXX/serendipity/ HTTP/1.1" 500 1005 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060427 Camino/1.0.1"

Can you point me to where I might find a decent log file? This is a shitty shared server so it might be that the reason I can't find it is because it doesn't keep logs / I don't have access to them.

Thanks!

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Oct 11, 2006 9:01 pm

Hi!

Sadly that snippet comes from the ACCESS log, not an error log. Could you ask your web provider for the error log? If there's no .htaccess file, there must be some other PHP error that is specific to your hosting provider...

HTH,
Garvin

Agustin · Post by **Agustin** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 7:38 pm

Hi everyone,
I'm new at this and I'm having the same problem as above, but my error log is: /home/case/public_html/serendipity/.htaccess: DirectoryIndex not allowed here.
Any idea about it?
Thanks in advance.

Agustin · Post by **Agustin** » Thu Oct 19, 2006 7:46 pm

Ok,
I just deleted .htaccess and it started to work, but why? I've read that deleting .htaccess will make impossible to use 'fancy' url, how could I make it work? Any suggestions?
Thanks again

judebert · Post by **judebert** » Fri Oct 20, 2006 5:24 am

Your server is configured to not allow certain directives in the .htaccess. DirectoryIndex is one of those directives. We use it to redirect URLs that point to the Serendipity directory so they point at our index.php.

Naturally, when you deleted the .htaccess, you deleted the DirectoryIndex inside it, so normal access was restored. And Serendipity works just fine that way (although URLs requesting your directory will return whatever your server has configured, and you aren't allowed to change it).

If you've got a copy of the .htaccess elsewhere (and I know you do; you seem like somebody who would've backed it up before deleting it

), you can just take out the DirectoryIndex line and see if there's anything else your server prohibits in there.

We also use the .htaccess to redirect 'pretty' URLs: the ones without "index.php?whatever" in them. That looks better, and the search engines understand them better, too.