HTTP 500 Internal Server Error accessing admin pages

[drcubi]

All was well yesterday, but server was rebooted while someone else was adding products.
Not website seems to function fine but I get a 500 error accessing admin page.

Has anyone seem this before? Any tips on what I might do to resolve, since I am at a complete loss and have no idea how to resolve short of resinstalling from the ground up which would be pretty extreme.

D

[DrByte]

A search of the FAQs/Tutorials section for "500" brings up this related article: http://www.zen-cart.com/content.php?...l-server-error

[drcubi]

forgot to mention there are no errors in httpd-error.log

[drcubi]

Thnx Doc, I had seen that page already and although its great info, its doesnt give any ideas for resolution.

I found an Apache error log (the one custom to this site) and this is the last line :

[Thu Jun 21 22:42:04 2012] [error] [client **my IP address **] PHP Warning: strtotime(): It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'America/Los_Angeles' for 'PDT/-7.0/DST' instead in /usr/home/mywebstore/custom_admin/login.php on line 13

[DrByte]

As the article says, you need to work with your webserver administrator to find the correct resolution.

"Error 500 - Internal Server Error" is a GENERIC response triggered by the server BEFORE Zen Cart can operate. So you need to work with the people who have access to the configuration components of the server that fire before Zen Cart is involved. And that means the webserver engine (apache and configs) and filesystem (files, file permissions, etc).

And the error message you quoted is talking about a PHP misconfiguration ... where the server's master PHP configuration doesn't have a timezone set in it. Again, the webserver top-level administrator has the access required to set that correctly in a way that prevents EVERYONE on the server from getting that error message.

[drcubi]

I have a FreeBSD VPS, and have access to my own php.ini
I had set the time zone to Canada/Vancouver, now changed to America/Los Angeles which made no difference.

This is my date section, is my syntax right?

[Date]
; Defines the default timezone used by the date functions
; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = America/Los Angeles
;date.timezone = Canada/Vancouver

Furthermore I have two other zen cart store running on the same server and with no issues, problem of locked out admin section only on of the three.

Does any of this help you to help me? I seriously doubt it but had to ask before reinstalling and losing the catalog we have spent months building. Which brings me to the next question, is it possble to backup/restore just product catalog using mysqldump?

Thanks again for your help so far.

D

[drcubi]

Just realized that the date.timezone error is a red herring, the other two store have the exact same error in their error logs.

[DrByte]

have no idea how to resolve short of resinstalling from the ground up which would be pretty extreme.

Yes, that would be excessively extreme. And probably wouldn't solve the problem ... because there's still no certainty that the problem has anything to do with Zen Cart.

What has your hosting company said about the matter? After all, you did say it was working just fine before the server was rebooted. And so that means the problem is a result of things that had been changed by the server administrator, and which didn't take effect until the reboot. So, *they* are the ones who need to identify what those changes were.
Perhaps they didn't tell you that they changed all kinds of security rules such as mod_security and/or things related to folders/files having varying permission levels that are suddenly no longer compatible with the way your store has been working just fine all along until their change.


But, if you really want to explore the "reinstall" idea, you could always do a fresh install of another Zen Cart store in another folder and database, and see what happens. Further, you could use the approach of comparing all your "broken" store's files against a clean copy of Zen Cart, and then sort out the differences. http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.p...Obscure_Issues