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#2858 – homepage not working with sh404sef/gantry/hydrogen

Posted in ‘sh404SEF’

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Tuesday, 18 October 2016 00:43 UTC

maladd

Greetings,

I upgraded my website months ago using sh404sef, gantry framework and the hydrogen template and everything was working well.

A couple months ago, it started to dispay displayed 404 or 504 errors on the homepage of my website (http://www.xxxx.org). I initially thought it was a timeout issue and asked the Plesk server sysadmins to increase timeout. Which they did. Things seemed ok for a couple days. I have since discovered that the homepage works fine when sh404sef is turned off. Other pages, like http://www.xxxx.org/Members.html work fine when it is turned on.

Today (and I have no idea why), if I click on the home menu or the image on the secondary template page, the home URL shows up as http://www.xxxx.org/index.php?sh404sef_splash=1

Joomla 3.6.2
sh404sef 4.8.0.3423
Gantry 5.3.6
Hydrogen 5.3.6

I have homepage defined as http://www.xxxx.org/index.php in sh404sef - Configuration - Advanced.
I have turned off the URL cache. I have cleared all my caches.
In the Global configuration, the SEO settings are Yes, Yes, Yes, No (unicode aliases). Cache is also disabled.

I do have a .htaccess file.

Any thoughts?

thanks!

M. A.

Tuesday, 18 October 2016 08:14 UTC

wb_weeblr

I have homepage defined as http://www.xxxx.org/index.php in sh404sef - Configuration - Advanced.

This is totally the problem. This field must be empty (unless you use a splash page - which I hope you don't), as per the description in the tool tip.

Rgds

Tuesday, 18 October 2016 15:02 UTC

maladd

I should have clarified that the home page URL field had been empty and I just tried populating it last Friday.

This URL does display my homepage: http://www.xxxx.org/index.php?sh404sef_splash=1

Tuesday, 18 October 2016 18:03 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

1 - So this is reproducible? each time sh404SEF is enabled, you get a 404? or a 500? or a 504 (which means a time out indeed)?

2 - If you set Joomla error reporting to maximum (with the issue happening), what do you get as an error message?

3 - Can you clarify:

This URL does display my homepage: http://www.xxxx.org/index.php?sh404sef_splash=1

Do you mean that even with sh404SEF enabled, you can display your home page fine at this URL, but not at the regular home page URL, http://www.xxxx.org/?

Rgds

Tuesday, 18 October 2016 18:43 UTC

maladd

1. Yes.

2. With error reporting turned on, I receive nothing on the frontend but the 504 Gateway Time-out. Other pages on the site display some strict standard type error messages, so I know I have it turned on correctly.

This is what shows up in the logs:

2016-10-18 13:37:12 Warning xxxx mod_fcgid: read data timeout in 120 seconds Apache error
2016-10-18 13:37:12 Error xxxx End of script output before headers: index.php Apache error
2016-10-18 13:37:12 Error xxxx 26278#0: *2307654 upstream timed out (110: Connection timed out) while reading response header from upstream nginx error
2016-10-18 14:35:12 Error xxxx 500 GET / HTTP/1.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/xxxx Safari/537.36 1.56 K Apache access
2016-10-18 14:37:12 Access xxxx 200 GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0 http://www.xxxx.org/ Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/xxxx Safari/537.36 1.16 K Apache access

3. Yes, with sh404sef enabled, http://www.xxxx.org DOES NOT WORK, but the URL http://www.xxxx.org/index.php?sh404sef_splash=1 DOES.

thanks!

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 06:52 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

1 - OK
2 - These are the web server logs, what do the PHP error logs say?

You seem to have rather complex setup, with Apache as frontend, and then nginx somewhere upstream to that? anyway, what'd be useful is to find out what running PHP logs say (PHP errors won't show on the page, if the upstream times out. But they still should be in the logs).

3

3. Yes, with sh404sef enabled, http://www.xxxx.org DOES NOT WORK, but the URL http://www.xxxx.org/index.php?sh404sef_splash=1 DOES.

That's more than weird. Let's see what the logs say.

Rgds

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 15:04 UTC

maladd

It is being hosted on a server running Plesk. I've asked the server SysAdmins for the php logs. I don't know if they even have php error reporting turned on.

In the meantime, I put a redirect in .htaccess file to send homepage only requests to the url that works. I'm not happy with it, but it beats the website appearing to be down.

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 15:10 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

Plesk is not involved in the actual serving of the pages, it's only a control panel, for configuration.

There is something weird happening here, on this server. I don't see how sh404SEF could even be involved, as "it was working fine" (whether it works when sh404SEF is disabled in no way means it is causing the problem), and I'm pretty sure this is a server config thing.

One thing to confirm that: could you remove this redirection, remove the index.php URL in sh404SEF config and try to load just http://www.xxxx.org/index.php

Rgds

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 15:19 UTC

maladd

I know what Plesk is - it was meant to explain why I didn't have ready access to some log files.

I'll try your suggestion and get back to you.

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 15:45 UTC

maladd

I commented out the entry in .htaccess. I had already removed the homepage value from the config. If I try to access http://www.xxxx.org/index.php, it responds with the 504 gateway error. Here is the output of the log files to which I have access.

2016-10-19 11:41:48 Error xxxx 500 GET / HTTP/1.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/xxxx Safari/537.36 Edge/13.10586 1.56 K Apache access
2016-10-19 11:43:48 Access xxxx 200 GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.0 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/xxxx Safari/537.36 Edge/xxxx K Apache access

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 15:48 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

This is still a web server entry, it doesn't say what happens in the PHP, in Joomla.

Could you please provide us with superadmin credentials to your website. You can create a temporary account, and delete it afterwards, but it must have superuser level.

Thanks and regards

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 16:14 UTC

maladd

URL for admin access: https://www.xxxx.org/administrator/?receiving=realadmins

username: xxxx
password: xxxx

I have commented out the Redirect.

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 16:45 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

You had "Record URL source" enabled, under "Data recording" (and a large orange warning on sh404SEF control panel because of that).

As per the tooltip: Record on which page non-sef URLs was found by Joomla and a SEF was created. Consider the server resources used by this feature before enabling it. It is most suited for debugging errors.

I bet the sh404SEF_urls_src table in your database is multiple GB large, and your server can't cope. I disabled that feature, and could load the home page.

Please confirm.

If so, I would suggest you empty that table (sh404SEF_urls_src, not sh404SEF_urls!), as it probably makes your backups very large for no purpose.

Rgds

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 17:32 UTC

maladd

On was the default setting for "Record URL Source". I just did a fresh install of sh404sef on another joomla site to verify it.

Wednesday, 19 October 2016 17:57 UTC

maladd

Though, what I should also add is a sincere thank you for figuring this out.

Thursday, 20 October 2016 06:59 UTC

wb_weeblr

On was the default setting for "Record URL Source". I just did a fresh install of sh404sef on another joomla site to verify it.

Actually it's not, that would be terrible and 100% of our users would kill us after a few days of operation!

I suspect you may have tested on a site where sh404SEF was previously installed and had that setting enabled. If you uninstall sh404SEF normally, all settings are carried over if you install back an hour or even a year later.
If you install on a fresh joomla setup, or uninstall sh404SEF after telling it to not preserve configuration (as described here), then installing again should provide you with the real defaults.

In general terms, when you have an orange warning showing on the control panel, it means we have detected something that needs attention, and it should be taken care of.

Anyway, very glad it's solved, this could have been one of those cases where one has spend a lot of time just to figure out what's happening!

Cheers

Thursday, 20 October 2016 15:55 UTC

maladd

I just uninstalled it on the spare site and deleted all the tables. When I reinstalled it, you are correct, it was turned off by default.

thanks again for your help!

M. A.

Thursday, 20 October 2016 16:16 UTC

wb_weeblr

Hi

You're welcome! Closing this ticket now, feel free to open a new one as needed. If you do so, please mention this ticket number in the new one.

If you created any superadmin account for us, be sure to delete or block it now to avoid unnecessary risk in the future.

Be sure to also check out wbAMP, our new Accelerated Mobiles pages plugin for Joomla - the next big thing is SEO, direct from Google themselves!

Rgds

This ticket is closed, therefore read-only. You can no longer reply to it. If you need to provide more information, please open a new ticket and mention this ticket's number.