Hi Everyone,
I think my head is about to explode... It seems I make a few good steps forward and then make giant slides backward!!!
I have for weeks been working on a web site and have been testing it both on my non-production systems and my production server, which by the way is a Suse 9.1 Linux box, Running Apache/2.0.49 and PHP 4.4.3.4-26.
This morning (10:00 A.M est) I decide to do a refresh of all the material on the production server as I had made some cross-site changes. I first backed-up my old site on the production server and I copied the root site folder into the htdocs folder in Apache
www. This differed from what I normally did because before I was copying only files not folder and files and not replacing all the sub-folders within the root web directory; however by copying the new root directory with new content over the old root directory I effectively replaced everything.
I then chmod 755 the root directory and all the sub directories and I chmod 644 all the files within the rood and sub directories.
so the root and sub directory permissions look like this:
drwxr-xr-x
and the files all have these permissions:
rwxr-xr-x
All the the web files are .php. The content pages are only .php pages that contain variables that are propagated with data. The also have an included .php file that utilizes the variables that are propagated from the variables in the content pages.
currently if I browse to the index.php file I get an absolutely blank screen. If I view source I get :
<html><body></body></html>
This means that none of the php variables data is being placed in the file and only the basic non php base html tags are showing.
I then have tested to see if php is working; so in the content pages rather than using variables I added a simple:
echo "this is really ticking me off!";
When I refreshed the blank page I get:
this is really ticking me off
This means that PHP is working.
This is why I believe that it has to be a permissions based issue, namely that it doesn't have permission to read the one or all of the files so it just doesn't display the data.
This is what my Apache permission structure looks like:
Code:
drwxr-sr-x: htdocs
drwxr-xr-x: Web
drwxr-xr-x: CSS
-rwxr-xr-x: web.css
drwxr-xr-x: Images
-rwxr-xr-x: web_logo.gif
-rwxr-xr-x: background.gif
drwxr-xr-x: Diagrams
-rwxr-xr-x: common_lifecycle.gif
drwxr-xr-x: Includes
-rwxr-xr-x: interior.php
drwxr-xr-x: Music
-rwxr-xr-x: Serco.mp3
-rwxr-xr-x: index.php
-rwxr-xr-x: faq.php
-rwxr-xr-x: tech_ov.php
I have rebooted the server.
I have checked to ensure that PHP is working
I have written test PHP files not based on those files shown above and while in the Web root folder they do not show their content if using variables and an include only straight up PHP.
I have checked and verified that apache virtual hosts are set up correctly for this group of files and it appears to be.
I have gone through the index.php and the include file interior.php, looking for any unclosed tag or missed ; or delimiter and they all check out fine.
I copied all the backed up files & folders into the root and it still didn't work. I then overwrote the entire folder with the old backup and it didn't work. Thus I think that it is permissions.
I hope that I have described enough for you to get a good picture of what I am dealing with.
Your Help would be fantastic as I am getting frazzled and for the time being running out of ideas. I am quite new to Linux and to apache and php, so it could be something simple that I am missing.
