Hi,

I've been running GL for many years and my hosts recently said they need to move me to a new server and got me to redirect the nameservers. I did that but then the hosts reported back that the move didn't work due to restore problems due to my site being large (about 600 MB, which is probably very small for some, but I don't think they're a big company). In the end they ftp'd everything over folder by folder. But nothing works (Firefox just says Unfortunately, an error has occurred rendering this page. Please try again later.) and they've run out of ideas.

I had my own full cPanel directory backup, so I unzipped the homedir.tar part, ftp'd it to the new server, and used cPanel / Filemanager to untar it. Didn't help.

I'm wondering if that should have worked or are there install commands that would've needed to be run?

We've been down for 2 days and I'm very time poor these days, my years of late nights feverishly working on the site are behind me, so I don't undertake anything major with the site these days, so if I have to re-install a fresh Geeklog and then copy in all the images and databases and our personal hacks and activate all the plugins etc then I guess we're going to be down for a couple of weeks.

If I do start afresh I guess I go for 1.8.1 and hopefully I can import the old database in? But first I'd like to understand what went wrong.

Cheers,
Brett

OK, got root debugging on (I'm VERY rusty at this). So the error is:

2 - mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user 'world_footyblog'@'localhost' (using password: YES) @ /home/world/geeklog/system/databases/mysql.class.php line 118

array(0) {
}

Any ideas?

OK, I'm going right back to first principles here. My database is called world_blog.sql and I can see it in my full site backup, kind of above the home directory, but I can't see it on the server. Where is that mysql directory actually live? A level higher than I can go?

Hi,

seems to be a database password issue. You can create a new user and a new password for your databaseand cha,ge the settings in your config file or db-config.php file.

Ben

---

I'm available to customise your themes or plugins for your Geeklog CMS

There was no user for the database according to cPanel, so I went to db_config as suggested to get the username and password, and added a new user. So now the error is simply:

"error selecting database"

cPanel allows me to actually add that user to the blog, but then there's numerous choices of what access to give. Presumably this would all normally be set up by Geeklog upon install and so has been lost by simply copying over. Any ideas what settings I should use? There's:

alter
create routine
create view
drop
index
lock tables
select
update
create
create temp. tables
delete
execute
insert
references
show view

You can give all rights to this new user.

Ben

---

I'm available to customise your themes or plugins for your Geeklog CMS

I see you are back online. Welcome back

Ben

---

I'm available to customise your themes or plugins for your Geeklog CMS

Thanks. For some reason the database no longer had a user associated with it. I don't understand how that happens. But I've now re-created it with full permissions and things are mostly working. However we seem to have lost a week of articles and comments - I can only assume the backup they used is old, so I've sent them my latest version. Presumably they can just drop in the newer sql file over the top.

What I don't really understand is where that file lives. There is my top level directory, and within that geeklog and public_html. When I do a full cPanel site backup a bunch of other files and directories are included, such as mysql and userdata. I assume they live somewhere else out of my reach as just a regular client of this webhost. But cPanel somehow knows to suck it in when I do a full backup? This isn't an important question, just wondering how it all works.

I don't think cpanel actually copies the files of the database for a backup. It creates a copy of the database using sql statements just like how export works for phpmyadmin (or how Geeklog Backup works). The odd time I have had to restore a db from a cpanel backup I just look for the databasename.sql file in the zip and import it using phpmyadmin.

Tom

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

Ah ok, so it sucks the data down and puts it in the zip file, and the website operator has to import it into the database. Makes sense. So possibly I could even try that myself rather than get the sys admin guy to do it. They said they had a failure when they tried to restore but import worked, problem now is just that they imported a copy that was a week old.

Thanks for the info.

I gave the hosts the sql file to import, they did but it only imported about 20% so our last story showed up as from 2006! I just tried myself and it worked fine, so we're back and fully functional! (I think).

Even though only down for about 5 days, we lost all our awstats for 20 days for some reason. I can live with that, but a bit annoying.

Thanks for the help.

Hi again,

Things have been pretty smooth since the change of server problems. The main exception is that several of my editors have reported strange errors that I can't replicate even though my privileges should be the same. One of them was trying to paste in youtube video embed code and they get errors:

Forbidden
You don't have permission to access /admin/story.php on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

And also they reported seeing:

Apache/2.2.22 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/1.0.0-fips mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.17 Server at www.worldfootynews.com Port 80

Any ideas? The permission on admin/story.php is 644.

Cheers,
Brett

I am not sure what is going on since you report everything works fine for you. Can your editors replicate the problem or does it only happen once in a while?

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One of the Geeklog Core Developers.

That looks like an Apache error message. In other words, something is happening before the request even gets to Geeklog. Try asking your hosting service. Or, if you have access to the Apache error_log, see if you can find an error message in there that corresponds to the time when your editors get that message.

bye, Dirk

I asked my host to follow this up and the response was that they contacted their parent company/provider and:

"Server has responded by saying they tweaked some server-side settings know to cause issues with Geeklog"

I asked my guys to try again and the response was:

"So far I have found that I can now get the video to embed if I post it in the bottom section, but get the same error message if I try to post it in the top section (the intro of a story)."

Does that shed any light?