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BLANK pages??
Posted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 8:36 pm
by 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
Re: BLANK pages??
Posted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 8:37 pm
by garvinhicking
Hi!
Please check your Apache and PHP error logfiles.
Blank pages usually mean Fatal PHP errors or coredumps.
HTH,
Garvin
Posted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 8:59 pm
by nocturne
i'm not sure how to check these...
will i need to reinstall this again?
Posted: Tue Sep 12, 2006 9:05 pm
by 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
Hosting Support
Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 12:27 am
by 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
Re: Hosting Support
Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 10:26 am
by 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
Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 4:11 pm
by 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
Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 5:59 pm
by 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
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 12:09 am
by 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
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:59 am
by nocturne
Ay,... why does stuff like this always happen to me?
thank you dougl for your continuing effort
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 9:51 am
by 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
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 8:46 pm
by 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
Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 8:47 pm
by dougl
Oh, and let me know if you want me to post our php.ini file contents.
-dougl
Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 9:47 am
by 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