Moodle white screening

Moodle white screening

by Ben Foster -
Number of replies: 8
Hi all

My course at

http://www.medicaleducator.co.uk/student/

Is all of a sudden white screening. If you view the page source it just shows:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en" xml:lang="en"

Its like the system is falling over at the first hurdle of producing the page. The system has been live for months now without any issues and all courses were created a few months ago. Nothing else has been added recently. We ahve had quite a few course registrations though.

Have i been hacked? Has anyone had this problem before, our could anyone advise which files to look at?

Thanks in advance for any help... im desperate!

Cheers
Ben
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In reply to Ben Foster

Re: Moodle white screening

by Mike Worth -
You need to get your debug reporting level up so that you can actually see the error messages. If you have access to the database try

UPDATE mdl_config SET value=38911 WHERE name='debug';

then try again


Mike
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In reply to Ben Foster

Re: Moodle white screening

by Mauno Korpelainen -

Yes, debugging errors might help (or checking server error logs)

My first thought was that your server has some "odd configuration" - html files seem to render everything ok but all php files show only those first rows. This does not look like a typical php hack anyway.

Check if there are any changes in your php files or some new settings/changes that might break all code. Check also documentation / FAQ about possible reasons of blank pages http://docs.moodle.org/en/Installation_FAQ#Why_is_a_particular_page_blank_or_incomplete.3F

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In reply to Mauno Korpelainen

Re: Moodle white screening

by Ben Foster -
Thanks guys

My error log shows the below... does that make any sense?

[Tue Feb 24 12:16:12 2009] [error] [client 80.222.122.250] Directory index forbidden by Options directive: /home/medicale/public_html/student/theme/standard/
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In reply to Ben Foster

Re: Moodle white screening

by Mauno Korpelainen -

That's my ip - I tested if your site gives a list of files from standard theme folder like http://moodle.org/theme/standard/

Your server gives now file not found errors:

Error 404 - Not Found

Oh no! You're looking for something which just isn't here! The URL you entered or followed no longer seems to exist, has been removed, or has been replaced.

Have you checked permissions of your site and that those files have not been moved accidentally to some other folder?

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In reply to Mauno Korpelainen

Re: Moodle white screening

by Ben Foster -
Hi Mauno

I have checked the themes folders and all files are there with the permissions OWNER - read/write, GROUP and OTHER - read. Is this how it should be?

My host doesnt allow access to those folders via a browser by default which is why it is erroring but if you access the server they are there.

There is nothing else in the error logs which is confusing!

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In reply to Ben Foster

Re: Moodle white screening

by Mauno Korpelainen -

Permissions look ok but there's still something odd going on.

If you try here http://moodle.org/theme/standard/styles.php you get something but when you try http://medicaleducator.co.uk/student/theme/standard/styles.php

you get 404 error page

So either your paths are not correct or there might be some kind of ReWrite rule (.htaccess file) hiding php files etc.

I have not seen exactly similar case - maybe somebody else has comments.

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In reply to Mauno Korpelainen

Re: Moodle white screening

by Ben Foster -
Aha!

Ive tracked the issue to the /student/theme/medicale1/header.html file

The html output was falling over at this line of code:

<html<?php echo $direction; @include_once($CFG->pixpath.'/i/s'.'xml.'.str_rot13('tvs')); ?>>

I have removed it and the site is back but the display is not correct. I think its due to removing the line above.

Can anyone advise how i can update this line of code to make the file work completely again?

Cheers
Ben
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