Configure permissions links result in HTTP 500 error - search

My company's Drupal installation leaves me unable to configure permissions from the admin panel. The key problem arises from the "Administer > By Module" page, where clicking on any of the "configure permissions" links results in a Page Not Found / HTTP 500 Error. A number of the settings pages are broken also, meaning that I cannot change the search_config module's settings, either.
I've checked Drupal's dblog messages, and there's no mention of the HTTP 500 errors there. I also wandered into the host's root (I'm on a shared hosting service) and checked out apache's error logs. No dice. Many errors from the other sites on the server, but only 2 old notifications of RSA certificate issues on my domain.
I've been working at this for about a week now, and I'm deeply perplexed as to what can cause this. I've tried turning off clean URLs, and manually entering what I believe to be the URLs for the settings pages, with the same result. This is developing into quite an issue for me, with permissions configuration offline, and also the search_config settings unavailable. Search_config is a big deal also, as I need to exclude some development nodes from the search index, as they are crashing cron's search indexing, preventing it from being up-to-date. Any light that the brilliant minds here can cast on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Edit: I'd also like to add that I'd looked into PHP settings, and that the php timeout is set at 120, with php memory set at 96M. (Just to be complete! ;) )
Currently running: Drupal 6.22, MySQL 5.1.61, PHP 5.2.17, on a shared Apache 2.2.22 server.

Alrighty. Turns out, in spite of increasing the allocated memory from 64M to 96M, a further increase from 96M to 128M for PHP execution was what did the trick. The menus are all online and functioning correctly. I guess the sheer number of installed modules represents a lot of overhead for the server. Thanks to everybody for looking!

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Getting error server unable to read htaccess file, denying access to be safe. My server keeps changing back to permission 710 automatically

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!

Drupal menu items and blog entries disappeared for anonymous users

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.

CentOS 5.6: Apache access permission after .htaccess upload

I was working on my home server remotely and wanted to make some changes to my .htaccess. I could not see this files using my FTP(filezilla) and thought there was none there. I decided to upload one I had in my computer to my server in public_html and although the upload was successful per FZ, this file is not listed anywhere, even when I physically access the server.
It looks like it is being hidden. The main problem is that after this, now I get the following error message and cannot access my test site:
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
If I access my server and DISABLE SELINUX or make it PERMISSIVE, my pages start working as normal. If I make it ENFORCING my webpage becomes unavailable and I see the error listed above.
Questions:
First of all, how can I make this .htaccess visible in a CentOS 5.6 system?
What is the difference between ENFORCING and PERMISSIVE?
Will I run into Security Risks if I leave my server setup as PERMISSIVE?
Thank you all,
Heh. No one has answered this in 4 months because it's hard to find an answer that is direct & specific (per the guidelines) and won't start a discussion. But I'll give it a try.
FileZilla can show hidden files, the method is different for different versions. Try the View or Server menu, or look for "hidden" in the built-in help.
ENFORCING means that selinux is running and prevents actions that violate its active policies. PERMISSIVE means that selinux is running and logs (but does not prevent) actions that violate its active policies.
Yes. Specifically, in ENFORCING mode, a hostile entity would have to both upload a file with malicious code and set the selinux context for the file in order to run it. In PERMISSIVE mode, they just need to upload the file. This is the most likely explanation for your experience: you uploaded a new .htaccess file, but did not set its selinux context.

MOSS 404 errors for some users on certain sites, sometimes

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.

Flush cache in iis6

For some magical reason ii6 started to cache pages on the server. Even if I remove the page, it is still displayed. I tried to follow couple suggestions but no luck.
That's what I did so far:
Deleted \WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files
Unchecked 'cache ISAPI extensions' in the IIS configuration.
Added 'Cache-Control no-cache' to HTTP headers in properties.
Tried to create the page that clear the cache http://www.dotnet247.com/247reference/msgs/13/67641.aspx
Update: also tried to disable asp cache
IIS ASP Caching
But the files in v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files are still created
If anybody has other suggestions, please share.
Thanks.
Please give the delete permission for IIS user on below folder. these files will be deleted automatically by IIS
For 64 bit OS folder path:
\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files
My classic ASP pages WOULD NOT refresh from any browser. Finally, stopping and starting the IIS service (IIS6) fixed the problem.
You, too, can go bonkers, just like me. Simply have IIS start giving out stale pages! A bargain at half the price!
Did you try restarting the IIS server to see if that stops it from displaying? If it doesn't, then it might not be a caching issue.
I believe restarting the server is supposed to clear the cache.
Maybe the problem isn't the IIS, but a web proxy between your browser and your web server caching the page?
Or a wrong DNS settings pointing to another server which holds a copy of that web/page? You could also look on the same IIS if there is another web configured and host headers got mixed up, making you test on the wrong web.
I might just say the obvious here but have you tried recycling the application pool?
Thanks for replies guys.
I figured out that it wasn't the caching issue. I didn't cleared out Bin folder and the compiled version of the page with extension .compiled was seating there all the time. I don't what changed this time, but I followed the same process like 100 times before and copied files on top without clearing Bin.
I should be more accurate with such things.

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