HELP : How do I completely delete an entry ?

[Chris]

Hi guys,

I'm hoping you can help me out with this one. I created an entry and inserted some text which by the looks of things isn't supported very well in PHP / mySQL. And as a result, I cannot edit the entry. Trying to do so, results in an internal server error. I cannot delete the entry using phpMyAdmin either as it results in the same.

So, I tried to do this using the mySQL command line and I have deleted the offending entry from the serendipity_entries table. But, I'm still getting this internal server error when I try to edit entries in serendipity.

I can create new entries with no problems but I just cannot edit entries. Do I need to delete the offending entry from any other table ?

thanks !

Chris

[garvinhicking]

Those internal server errors seem to indicate a problem with your server. Is it a code 500? What is your server setup, can you give us a <?php phpinfo(); ?> output?

If you have access, browse through your server error logs and see what is the exact error message for the error. I can tell you it most certainly will have nothing to do with an actual entry. I suppose your server coredumps because of some issue(s)...

Regards,
Garvin

[Chris]

Hi Garvin,

Thanks for your response. I have emailed the support guys of my hosting provider to see if I can get a copy of the server error logs.

It is an error 500. The funny thing is that the rest of serendipity seems to work fine, it errors only when I click edit entries, add media, manage categories.

I wonder if it has something to do with permissions ?

I really don't much about PHP at all. How can I get you the output of <?php phpinfo(); ?> ?

thanks,

Chris

[Chris]

Hi Garvin,

Figured out the phpinfo part !

I've PDFed the output of the phpinfo script :

http://www.christopher-chan.com/phpinfo.pdf

thanks !

Chris

[garvinhicking]

Hi Chris!

Looking at your phpinfo output I can see that your Server runs CGI/FastCGI. It can very easily be that the FastCGI crashs on your server because of coredumps and/or timeouts or memory limits. You can only find the reason via the error_log, and it will most possibly not be a Serendipity issue. When a apache module coredumps or unexpectedly crashes it'S a fault of the underlying PHP and/or server setup, as PHP applications themselves should not be able to crash a system. That's the theory at least.

So please wait for the report of your server guys, they will need to fix it...

Regards,
Garvin

[Chris]

Hi Garvin,

Thanks again for all your help with this. It looks like the problem is fixed ! Here's what the hosting support team tells me :

This is happening due to an Apache module we use called mod_security, which is meant to protect against things like SQL injection attacks. It's erroring on the page because you're sending data which contains the word "select", a word that makes it believe it might be a direct SQL query.

Would it be possible for you to change the wording on that parameter? If not, or if it would be difficult, would you prefer that mod_security be disabled for your site?

---
I wanted to let you know that after further evaluation we've decided to temporarily disable this filtering until we can work further to ensure that it will not inadvertently block valid scripts from functioning. The error you were seeing earlier is now gone. Sorry about the trouble.

Initially, I thought an entry that I had created caused this server error because I was posting about the Firefox IDN issue and I had copied and pasted some non-standard domain names into my entry. Coincidentally, this was probably also around the time when the hosting provider decided to turn on their filtering.

regards,

Chris