So I've been using a VPS server from namecheap for the past 2 yrs or so and I use it to host some of my clients websites and dashboards to manage mobile apps. Since yesterday around noon all my websites & dashboards started loading the following error:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access this resource.Server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe
Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
I contacted my hosting support and they said my home folder for my server was set to permission 710 and using SSH on my WHM dashboard they changed to 711, right after that all my websites, dashboards and even mobile apps came back online and started working, then around 15 minutes later it happened again, I again contacted hosting support and they did the same process and everything came back online, I started to see a pattern here so I asked if they could explain how they changed permissions to 711 on SSH so I can do this myself if needed.
Well its been around 10hrs now and my websites, dashboards & mobile apps keep doing the same thing they go offline and cannot be accessed (For mobile apps they don't load any information) until I access WHM and change my home folder to permission 711.
So I know it has something to do with an htaccess file but have no idea which one or even why its automatically being changed every 15 minutes or so. One of the possibilities mentioned by hosting support was that I may have malware (Wouldn't know how) or one of my scripts uploaded has issues causing my whole server to keep crashing.
I already deleted the 2 scripts uploaded in the last two days but that didn't seem to fix anything, and hosting support takes so long to give me just the most basic answers but most importantly they are just giving me temporary fixes and say they have no idea why this is happening.
I am considering downloading each one of my scripts one by one until im only left with my main site and then start uploading them again one by one to see if I can locate the script causing all of this.
If you have any other ideas on why this could be happening I would really appreciate it if you guys can point me in the right direction.
Thanks!
Related
I have a Node project running on a Windows server using IISNode on a Windows virtual machine.
Everything worked fine up until a few days ago when the VM underwent a Windows update, and now the site isn't serving any files.
When I start the server, there is no indication of anything being wrong, but when I go to the URL, I get the message:
www.mydomain.com didn't send any data
ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE
Initially, when I was checking all the settings, I noticed that when I clicked 'Test Settings' under basic settings, that there was an authorization failure saying it cannot verify access to the source code directory.
But when I changed it to connect as specific user instead of application user, the error went away but the above issue was unchanged.
This makes me think it could be a permissions issue, but I've granted permission to the App Pool, IIS_IUSRS and IUSR, so I could be wrong.
I've tried multiple solutions on StackOverflow, including this highly rated one with no luck.
Any help would be appreciated.
Annoyingly, I found the answer a few hours after placing the bounty.
The problem was that it didn't have a static IP address, so when the VM was updated it was on DHCP and so was allocated a new IP, hence the website stopped working.
This post needs help from experienced iis administrators, but must be explained in details for EXTREME newbies.
What I am doing:
I have two computers, both running Windows 10. One is a desktop and one is a laptop.
iis is enabled on both computers. Each computer can access the iis web server from the other and pull up a page from the other - using the ip address.
There is no DNS or host files being used (this is by ip address only), nor do I want to use any sort of naming.
Both computers are running an identical website, and the website files are in a different directory than the default. The structure is like this:
C:\inetpub\ROOT\myWebsite\myIndex.html
web.config
Changes I've made - now a few problems.
On both computers I have deleted the DefaultAppPool and the default website that comes installed with iis. This has not stopped the website from completely working, so adding that back seems unlikely to fix my problem.
I have deleted my application pool and website from iis (never deleting the actual files from the file system) several times, and added it several times. Each time I do this, my site comes back, but with the same problem I am having.
I have deleted all of the default documents, and the only default document listed in iis is myIndex.html.
myIndex.html initially displays a graphic image (using the standard tag), and this image comes up. Sort of. See explanation below.
The problem I am having
Before I started this project, I had iis working on the desktop with the default site and app pool and simply added some of my own files with really simple text content and some pics. I had replaced the default iis splash image with my own image, and all that worked with no problem.
the image that comes up is a link to another page that has a list of links to other stuff in my website. It all works no problem there.
Now, with the setup I have now, on the desktop I was originally using (in the paragraph above) if I pull up my website locally, myIndex.html loads in the browser and my image comes up, and everything works fine.
The same is true on the laptop, when I access the site locally.
However, if I attempt to access the desktop site (using its ip address) from the laptop, it pulls up the old splash image from the default site I deleted.( I left those files there even though I deleted the site from within iis). All those files are in the default location C:\inetpub\wwwroot.
If I move those files to another directory, thus leaving C:\inetpub\wwwroot completely empty, then when I access the site on the desktop (via the ip address) from the laptop, my new site comes up without a problem.
While it seems I may have solved my problem by moving the file from the previous project, doing that does not teach me how iis is actually working, and why files from a website that no longer exists in iis are still being accessed from remote computers.
So, please teach me something about the internal workings of iis, and how it chooses to access the different application pools and websites.
Again, please word your answers for complete newbies, because I know a little but not enough to get real technical.
I have been reading posts on stackexchange.com and other sites; links to microsoft docs etc. That's not helping as those docs are expecting too much prerequisite knowledge, and speaking in terms that are not really explaining things in a way I can understand.
You have described several different problems. I will try to address each of them (contrary to S/O recommendations).
First, when you make changes, and they don't seem to show up, it is usually because of caching. IIS always wants to cache files/configs. So does your web browser. So, to force an accurate test, you need to dump your browser cache and cycle IIS (to make sure it drops its cache and loads new files and configs). Start there.
Second, IIS is designed for settings inheritance. Which means, each app and each folder will inherit settings and permissions from the parent, unless you override them. Overriding them can be done by files and/or IIS configs (application vs folder). The IIS configs are the stronger of the two.
Also, the IIS config for "default files" might have come into-play for your test. If you didn't set up MyIndex.html as the top-most default file, then IIS would look for other files first. In fact, if you don't have MyIndex.html in the list of default files, IIS would have to depend on your app to choose that as a default page (MVC routing, etc).
I've setup a UNC share for IIS shared config using a specific AD service account and set to FULL CONTROL. I've also exported the config from one IIS server and set-up an additional IIS server to point to the share. When I open the applicationhost.config for example on the UNC share and remove an application pool, I can see the entry also remove in both IIS servers.
So I know:
1) I can export to the share with the specific service account
2) Both IIS servers can read the config when I edit manually
3) However when I remove an app pool from one of the IIS servers through the manager I get the above error.
I've tried using the process monitor utility to see what account is being used to write to the config and it seems it is my own AD user account rather than the shared service account. I know IIS Manager has my username e.g. ROOT\MYNAME logged on, but I wouldn't have thought it would use this to write changes to the shared config. Surely it would use the service account?
Does anyone know how to prevent this error? Why does the shared config and tied service account not come into play when making changes on one of the servers?
So, IMHO, this error is a red herring. I was publishing to a server and got a message saying I was out of space. So, I logged in, realized there was a bit of cruft in extra apps published in IIS, we didn't need. I right clicked and tried to remove one. I got the same error as you.
Having done some manual changes to applicationHost, I thought it "might be me" but it seemed very odd that editing this file would cause such a thing. However, I had recently learned that windows does some funky 32 vs 64bit machinations with this file (google it).
Deciding I had better things to do, I asked our IT to add space to the VM and guess what? I am no able to remove these apps. My guess is that I was at the end of the line on space and the backend management of these special files was not completing and throwing this not-so-helpful exception.
I'm not a 100% about this. For full disclosure, I will add that updates had been applied recently, but I'm pretty confident that this is a possible solution.
I've been struggling with a problem now for a few hour and I cannot find any answers or anyone with the same problem -
Some menu items are missing on my site www.namhost.com (Drupal 6.22) and when viewing the blog it shows "No blog entries have been created". When I log in as admin everything works fine, so this problem only occurs for anonymous/guest users.
I've changed nothing on the site which may have caused this problem and here comes the really strange part - When viewing a copy of the site locally everything works 100% even for anonymous/guest users.
I've tried:
flushing caches
rebuilding permissions
checked if the "anonymous" user is present in the database
viewing on different browsers
None of these yielded any results.
Because the problem doesn't occur locally I'm starting to believe this could be a problem on the server the site is hosted on (Linux with PHP5.2), but the admins had a look and couldn't find anything.
Any help/insight would be highly appreciated.
================FIXED<<<<<<<-----------------------------
I am not allowed to answer my own question and it was suggested that I edit the question to include my answer so here goes:
Firstly, thanks for all the responses.
I disabled the "ACL" module (http://drupal.org/project/acl) and the problem was solved. It was previously used for our forum which was also disabled a few months back, so it's not needed any more.
I still have no idea why this module caused the site to work locally but not on the server. I will be in contact with the server admins to find out if they changed/updated anything on the server which may have caused this module to cause a malfunction.
Any insight could still be helpful top prevent this from happening again.
Check your Drupal config:
Are you using node_access, content_access, or any other permissions-related addon mods? Disable them and see if the problem persists. If that doesn't work, disable all non-core mods and re-enable them one-at-a-time until you find the offender.
Compare your hosting configs:
If it's not related to Drupal, compare the local and remote server configurations. Do both use the same versions of php, apache, apc, cgi, etc.? A phpinfo(); on both servers should give you the most important details for comparison. Do a similar comparison of the MySQL setup and content. Finally, check for differences in your .htaccess files (if any) between the two locations.
Test another hosting enviornment:
Download a virtual appliance like QuickStart which is already configured to host Drupal sites for development and non-production purposes, and see if the site works correctly in that. If it does, you could do an additional validation by porting to a new host who offers a trial/money-back-guarantee and see if it works correctly there.
If your site works fine elsewhere, give your current host a good thrashing for making you go through all of this to figure out the problem lies on their end.
Everything works fine for most accounts 100% of the time but here and there some users who are able to access a subsite fine one day are greeted with a standard 404 the next. This can last for an hour or two days, it's really inconsistent.
I check the iis logs and it says the status is also a 404 for these requests, nothing else looks unusual. Sharepoint logs have nothing for the timestamps either.
Correct me if I am wrong but if it was a permission issue an access denied message would be shown.
It is not the individual computer because when a user is having this problem and I can log in with their account and I also get the 404 error although I am on the exact site with another account in another browser at exactly the same time, and it works perfect.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I've done a fair amount of searching but can not find a similar situation or help anywhere.
Since the information is very strict at the moment, I will throw a few questions that might lead you towards the problem.
Are we on a loading balance setup? The intermittent 404 might be cause by one of the servers Web FrontEnds not correctly serving requests.
Are we running out of disk space in the SQL Server machine? This might cause it
Are the blogcache or site caches enabled? Some routines may break them
Do we have Anti-Virus on the server? (it HAS to be asked :p)
We get very high packet loss between the servers? (The error would be different though)
Something that might occur very often is when you have, say, custom code a DLL on the GAC or the bin folder, and since you could be on loading balance the second server does not have this DLL in its own GAC or BIN folder. Sharepoint usually raises 404s when assemblies are not found too, not only requests.
This seems like a longshot, but... could those SharePoint sites be throwing a 404 HttpException? It seems like you'd see that in the SharePoint logs, too, so it's even more unlikely.
At any rate, is your SharePoint logging level set to an appropriately verbose level to debug weird stuff like this?
Are people checking in & publishing master page changes when new CSS files and/or other includes (script files, etc.) are not yet published at all? I've seen this cause a 404 a few times when users forget to check before they publish.
I have had to write custom code within a SharePoint context and I had those 404 errors as well. The solution, in my case, was to ensure that the block of code executing had these 2 conditions met:
1) Run with elevated privileges, regardless of the fact that it is a 404 this was part of the solution.
2) web.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true; This line of code needed to be added even though it was wrapped within an elevated privileges block.
Once these were added the issue did not occur. This was happening on both load and non-load balanced environments.
This reminds me of a strange asp.net bug that I had a few months back.
It was caused by a patch that had been applied (to the framework if I remember correctly)
try downloading this Windows update list tool and have a look at what has changed since the problem started.
I concede that if there was a problem with a patch then its more likely that it would be a consistent error, but it's worth a look.
It was a permission issue, I had figured this out awhile back but basically a few accounts were not setup properly and could not load a fresh copy of the page, when someone else would hit it they would be able to view the cached page fine. Error was never thrown as a permission issue or access denied anywhere but this is what fixed the problem.