[solved?] Error: 500 Internal Server Error

[vidicious]

New user and new installation of PS.

Followed instructions exactly and set permissions as required by instructions.

Front and back ends seem to function normally. Then I make a few changes in the back end settings and then both front and back give 500 ISEs.

I seemed to have forced a reset a couple times by reuploading the install folder (only because I was going to try and rerun the installation). Then things revert to 500 ISE again ...

Any insights?

[tomerg3]

Try to do a search on the forum next time, this is a pretty common problem.

Many hosts do not allow you to set 777 permissions for php files, and will show error 500 if you do.
Try changing the permissions to 755.

[vidicious]

I DID search the forums for 2 hours before I posted that. I read some of the posts you referred to and tried 755 though not entirely clear on the issue.

Reverted to the original 777 permissions as originally explicitly instructed, and things started working with no explanation after a couple more hours of ISEs on reload. I have circumstantially observed that reuploading the install directory and/or renaming the admin directory seemed to kick the PS software back into working mode. But nothing that was truly controllable.

Now starting a fresh installation to confirm functionality and usability.

I am trying to understand where the issue was in the event of another installation/reinstallation.

[tomerg3]

Error 500 is a very general error that can be caused by many things.

The only way to find ou exactly what was wrong is te check the error log on your server.

Some hosting companies use the error log by default, but some require you to manually enable error logging.

You can check your control panel for those logs, or ask your hosting company.

777 permissions are not recommend to be used, I know the installation files say to use 777 but that is very unsecure, even a bad hacker would be able to exploit it in some malicios way.

[vidicious]

Thank you, all that makes sense.

The errors stopped for a while and then came back around after another 24 hours or so.

I have contacted the hosting co, but am wondering if any insight can be gathered here as well. Thanks again.

***

What I'm seeing in the logs now is:

FastCGI: comm with (dynamic) server "/var/chroot/home/content/y/o/g/servername/html-x-httpd-php5" aborted: (first read) idle timeout (60 sec)

FastCGI: incomplete headers (0 bytes) received from server "/var/chroot/home/content/y/o/g/servername/html-x-httpd-php5"

[vidicious]

UPDATE ...

After numerous searches and attempts at resolution, this seemed to work so far:

change host association for .php files from FastCGI to just straight PHP 5.x

[tomerg3]

Nice, glad to see it's sorted out

[Emanresu]

Having the same problem with a new install on Godaddy. Switched on the error logging and most of the errors are

FastCGI: comm with (dynamic) server "/var/chroot/home/content/....../html-x-httpd-php5" aborted: (first read) idle timeout (60 sec)

Found a solution as follows

Thank you for contacting Hosting Support.

I would suggest changing the php to not use fastcgi. You can do this by going into the hosting control center and clicking settings then from the drop down menu select file extensions. Once the page load click edit next to .php on list and then from the drop down box choose PHP 5.x. This should resolve the issue and prevent it from occurring again.

Please contact us if you have any further issues.

This seems to support your solution - at least for Godaddy hosts. Drawback is that response time has increased to 2-3
secs from sub 1.