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22.03.09
Recovering from Internal Server Errors
Posted in General Colin McNulty Stuff at 12:31 pm by Colin McNulty
You may have noticed that my blog has been offline for a couple of days. To be honest, I’m not sure how it happened, but I have discovered the cause. The
process of fixing it may prove beneficial to others, so I’ll detail it here. Here’s what the problem looked like:
As you can see, that’s of no help. So the first thing to check was whether the blog WordPress admin pages were working. Nope, same error there. So it’s off to
the trusty cPanel to check the server logs. Clicking the “Error Log” gave a lot more information:
Now this makes no sense at first, what’s a SoftException and what’s a writeable group? Here’s my simple interpretation, a soft exception is an error, which in
this case isn’t to do with the file contents itself, but the real clue is the “[file] is writeable by group” bit.
Writeable is a permission (like read or execute) and group is one of the 3 types of user that you can set permissions for: Owner, Group and Public. So it
appears that our problem is to do with the file permissions for the index.php file, specifically that the Group set, has writeable permissions, which isn’t correct.
Now it’s off to the cPanel “File Manager” to check the permissions:
You can see the permissions are set to “0777“. Don’t worry too much about this, but you do need to know that this is wrong and it should be 755 in most cases.
In fact, it wasn’t just index.php that was set to 777, but every file and every folder! I can’t imagine what has caused this, but I assume it was a dodgy upgrade
script. Either way, now to fix it by setting the permissions back to 755.
I use an ftp plugin for Firefox called FireFTP which allows this. Selecting all the files and folders using Ctrl+A, right clicking and selecting “Properties (incl
contents)” and after a few minutes of processing, you get a permissions dialog box up:
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Internal Server Error, SoftException, Is Writeable By Group, Wordpress http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2009/03/22/recovering-from-internal-...
Just untick the Write boxes against the Group and Public users, and tick the “All Contained Folders” and “All Contained Files”
Click OK and wait for a few minutes whilst Fire FTP ripples through all your files and folders resetting the permissions, and Bob’s your uncle, Internal Server
errors and “is writable by group” errors are gone and the WordPress blog is back up!
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20 Comments »
1. Tonester said,
Col, was the upgrade script a WordPress update or one of your own? Do you need someone to (expertly) test it for you next time? Cheers Tone
Well I’m only guessing it was a dodgy script, but I had upgraded a few of my plugins recently. So no, it wasn’t one of my scripts.:p
3. Robin said,
Thank you so much for posting this! I was having problems importing wordpress files and getting the Internal Server Error. Frustrating! But I did exactly
2 of 5 12/1/2010 2:39 PM
Internal Server Error, SoftException, Is Writeable By Group, Wordpress http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2009/03/22/recovering-from-internal-...
You’re welcome Robin. A mention and link back is always appreciated, as it helps others with the same problem.
5. johnny said,
6. Christopher said,
Thank you so much!! You just saved me endless hours of troubleshooting this. Your solution worked perfectly!!!
7. Steven said,
Colin,
Thank you very much for posting this resolve! After reading your post and checking the errors in the log file, I had a “EUREKA!” moment and changed
the settings. In no time at all I was able to access the backend…..you’re a lifesaver! Thank you once again.
I love getting these nice warm fuzzy feelings. All link backs welcome, which help others solve the same problem.
9. ALI said,
thanks very much for posting this it really helped me solve my sites problem.
A pleasure Nand.
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siapa tahu ada teman-teman yang mengalami hal [...]
Thanks a lot!
You are a saver!
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Internal Server Error, SoftException, Is Writeable By Group, Wordpress http://www.colinmcnulty.com/blog/2009/03/22/recovering-from-internal-...
Great! It worked!
Colin, thank you so much for posting this…the “famous 5 min wordpress install” was becoming a nightmare for me!
Thanks! I was going nuts about some unzipped apps in my folders.. saw the error in my logs.. some googleing and boom! here is the answer.
This guy deserve a donation. I was scared, but it was fixed. yayyyyyyyy!!!
Gracias.
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