My website is gone/missing

[fraunie]

Um, is this normal. I was clicking on my website and there's an Earthlink page that said it's moved/missing/gone. I checked my directory through the FTP and it's all there, so I'm confused...

[fraunie]

Okay, now it's back, not that I'm complaining. Is there a reason it does that?

[Xepher]

If you got an earthlink page, then you were connecting to something other than xepher.net. Most often this happens when your ISP (is it Earthlink?) decides to reroute your DNS request to a "help page" when it thinks it can't find something. In much more rare cases, a DNS server has actually been hijacked or corrupted and is giving back bad results. If your ISP IS earthlink, then it's probably not a big deal, they just couldn't resolve the domain for a moment or something. If/when it happens again, see if http://xepher.net (or these forums) are still working. If they are, then the server is up and functioning, and the problem is elsewhere. There are, of course, cases where the server is out of contact (usually when the datacenter does something like maintenance, or when we have genuine problems) but actually getting an earthlink page sounds suspicious unless they're your ISP.

[fraunie]

Hm, I guess that makes sense. I've been recently using a new wifi connection, so they're probably earthlink. Yeah, the forum worked and so did the other Xepher pages, so it just made me really confused. Thanks for the help.

[fraunie]

Uh, now I really don't know what happened.

http://fraunie.xepher.net/blog/

It's all funny and saying there's some error with my plugin/cache. Help?

[Xepher]

That's a word-press error of some kind. Could it possibly be the short-tags problem mentioned here? http://xepher.net/forum/index.php?topic=636.0

[fraunie]

Eh... possibly, I was trying to mess with perma-links among other stuff in the settings, but I don't think that's what you're getting at. I didn't mess with the code at all, just the settings panel on my dashboard and all the sudden I have an inability to fix anything.

[Xepher]

Well, if you know what setting you changed that broke it, you could try going directly into the database and changing that setting back, see if that fixes it.

As for the error itself, it's basically saying that there's a bit of code that the script is trying to use, but that function hasn't been defined yet. Usually that happens when you forget to include the file with that function... or it gets included later in the page, and something before that tries to use it. Was that page something you edited/created at all?

[fraunie]

Bah, I don't know. I wish I could try to go back into my dashboard to fix it, but my log-in show a similar page and so does anything I try to change within the dashboard page that I kept open before the error occur. As soon as it happened, I thought to reverse whatever I did, but whenever I tried to save the changes it just goes to a similar page like the one show. I think it's going to have to be me re-installing all of wordpress again *le sigh*.

[Xepher]

I think I fixed it. Something you did replaced the wp-config.php file with one containing only a single line, disabling wp-cache. I'm guessing the setting you changed may have had something to do with cache. I restored the config file from last week's backup, and the blog seems to work again. The file was oddly in Mac format text, so I wonder if that doesn't have something to do with it. I'm guessing you have a Mac, but did you try editing that file, or reuploading it recently? That's the only thing I can think of at the moment that would've nuked the rest of the file.

[fraunie]

Yeah, I tried to fix the config file when I found that somebody on the wordpress forums had a similar error. I was opening it in dreamweaver, but that was all it contained (which was what the other guy had a problem with). I'm not really sure what the deal was, but I'm glad you fixed it. I think I'm going to make another back up of the "fixed up" stuff and change my passwords for good measure.

Thanks again! I was about ready to bust out a re-install of everything (my backups were too old) and this makes everything now non-migraine inducing.

[Xepher]

Well, keep in mind that the server makes nightly backups, and keeps things for 6 weeks. Not saying you shouldn't keep your own backups as well, but I know most people don't back things up nightly or anything. So when stuff like this happens, I can effectively roll-back any changes, which can come in quite handy.