Serendipity Forums

Newbie error!

I just uploaded the s9y folder to my webspace (PowWeb) and upon browsing to "/serendipity/index.php" I get a 500 Internal Server Error.

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The server encountered an unexpected condition which prevented it from fulfilling the request.
The script had an error or it did not produce any output. If there was an error, you should be able to see it in the error log.
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I'm sure I haven't set something correctly or something like that - I read in the PowWeb documentation that "we do not allow any of the Options features of the .htaccess AllowOverride directive on our servers." Is that going to be a problem? Anyway I'm not sure where the error log is produced, so any help here guys would be fantastic.

Thanks so much.

Hi!

In fact s9y uses some settings in a .htaccess file. Those are not really required (only if you'd use URL Rewriting), so you can safely just remove the .htaccess file if you set URL REwriting to "None" [you can do that in the admin interface after you removed that .htaccess file]

HTH,
Garvin

Hi there!

Thanks a ton for the reply.

I hate to be a complete newb - but where exactly can we find these .htaccess files? They are hidden I take it - I have set my FTP client to show hidden files but I do not appear to be able to see them to remove them. Is this something done via our FTP client or host provider? Thanks again

Hi!

No problem The .htaccess file lies within the root of your serendipity installation! Some FTP clients in fact hide that file, as well do some FTP servers. So if you can't see it with a tool like SmartFTP, you might need to ask your provider to either properly configure the FTP server or to remove that file for you?

Another way to get rid of it is to write a small PHP file remove.php:
And then call that via http://yourhost/remove.php and then PHP will remove the file for you.

HTH,
Garvin

Thanks again for your help. I gave that remove.php trick and there was an interesting development - even calling the remove.php file from root or from within the serendipity folder gives me the exact same error I posted up above.

When I first started using PowWeb last week none of my files were showing and the support told me to put everything in a directory called htdocs there, which is what I do, and even a file in htdocs can be accessed simply from www.host.com/file. Could that be in some way related?

Trying to figure this out is silly so thanks for sticking by!

Kinda. I use PowWeb, so I know what you're experiencing.

htdocs/ is just the directory where your web pages are located, that's all. If you know how to use FTP, you're golden; just ftp to your account, go to the htdocs/serendipity directory, and delete (or better yet, rename) the .htaccess file.

If you don't know FTP, no biggie; log in to your account through ops.powweb.com. Keep going until you eventually get to OPS. Go to the Site Tools; FileManager and navigate to your htdocs/serendipity directory. Rename the .htaccess file.

Then let us know what happens.

Hi there,

Thanks a lot for your reply.

I e-mailed tech support at PowWeb and they told me CGI wasn't active (I had set it active but it had been reset since my plan change). So it's all up and running now.

Thanks a tonne for your help guys!