Server inconsistent with domain name and/or root folder designation

[traq]

I'm a bit hesitant to post all of the information here for security reasons. What do you think? I can edit it out later I suppose.

I don't think anything you posted is a security risk. But you can delete it now if you wish; I don't see any likely culprits (except the directories-with-dots, but you say you've looked into that, so I believe you).

Only things I can think of:

1. Maybe it just hasn't been long enough for all of your fixes to propagate (though I kinda doubt this).

2. Have you tried removing the htaccess file from the primary domain's former root? I don't see anything wrong with it, but I can't help but think that this might be some kind of htaccess-cascade issue.

If neither of those, then I'm inclined to say it's GoDaddy's problem and "good luck" finding it. (Sorry to be so blunt.) I've heard good things about domain registration with GoDaddy, but (until you) I'd never come across anyone remotely happy with their hosting; not even on the "it's okay if you don't need tech support" level.

I'm sending you a PM.

[djr33]

except the directories-with-dots, but you say you've looked into that, so I believe you

I think I looked into it-- I changed some to directories without dots. One was ci-pro, which was originally ci-pro.com for several years with no problems until the problems started, and playing around with it for a bit I ended up with cip/ instead, which might or might not have been part of a partial solution involving changing some of the code around, for a very temporary fix a few months ago. But in the end, it looks like those with and those without dots are doing the same weird things. I wouldn't be shocked if this is somehow the problem (perhaps that *any* of my sites have dots in them still? I haven't tried removing all of them), but it doesn't seem like it's the problem in any simple sense.

1. Maybe it just hasn't been long enough for all of your fixes to propagate (though I kinda doubt this).

I am always concerned about this because it's impossible to know if it's been long enough, but I also kinda doubt that.
One possibility (albeit an odd one) is that the alternation is due to multiple name servers or something along those lines, with one working and the other not working. But at least in the case of ci-pro.com it was months of problems (assuming this really is the cause, which seems to be the case to me), so that would be weird. It's possible, regardless, that it's a settings issue, where it only was set correctly on half of the (whatever does this), but that's a major GoDaddy bug if so.

2. Have you tried removing the htaccess file from the primary domain's former root? I don't see anything wrong with it, but I can't help but think that this might be some kind of htaccess-cascade issue.

I'll try that now. I'd like an easier way to deal with that required "primary" domain anyway. Since that subdomain doesn't exist, this is probably not a security concern. I'm still wondering whether it might eventually be automatically created by GoDaddy via my use of it in that way, but it has now been about 3 days so that seems unlikely. If it was going to happen, it would have happened already. I think... but I don't want access to my root folder. This is clearly, unrelated to everything else, an oversight by GoDaddy or perhaps an intentional trick to get us to buy their next-level ultimate domain manager where you can control these things (and, for example, set * subdomains).
Ironically I just renewed my hosting on the 31st because it was expiring, and with some time at this point I was hoping to get some of my sites fixed / further developed. So I hope that wasn't a waste of money.

If neither of those, then I'm inclined to say it's GoDaddy's problem and "good luck" finding it. (Sorry to be so blunt.) I've heard good things about domain registration with GoDaddy, but (until you) I'd never come across anyone remotely happy with their hosting; not even on the "it's okay if you don't need tech support" level.

I hope I'm giving a reasonable impression of what I think of GoDaddy-- basically I need a place to put files that has reliable uptime, is reasonably fast, and has enough bandwidth and disk space for a low price. I'm not asking for more than that. Therefore, in that, GoDaddy is just fine most of the time, unless any issues come up, which they rarely do if I'm not trying to do anything particularly special. But of course I was hoping that their "unlimited sites" description on this hosting was not accompanied by all of these weird problems.
One of my sites may eventually require a dedicated server, or at least a higher end one; I wouldn't use GoDaddy for that; it's for the basics, but it usually does work for the basics. For what I'm doing at the moment I wouldn't expect this to be happening.

Anyway, the only real problems I've ever had with GoDaddy are with explaining problems to tech support and getting a reasonable response. It usually works out, just takes a while. If after this I end up moving to a new host, that's fine. I use them for domains so I may as well use them for hosting. But that's all.

[djr33]

Ok, just to add a bit more info, here's a URL that is still showing problems for lingkit:
http:// www lingkit.com/wiki2/248

So it seems that this has to do with the actual requested URL as much as the server configuration. And it also seems like part of the requested URL is being used to generate the corrupted requested URL, as Nile hinted at before. Weird!!

--
I also have now removed the .htaccess file from the root directory (the others are still there, such as inside ci-pro). It doesn't seem to be making any difference. I renamed it to htaccess.txt, so it should be completely gone. But it might take a while for it to reset. Feel free to take a look. I'm still getting errors here:
http://thebrb.com/nopage



Edit:
It looks like that DID change it, but it didn't FIX it. Now the thebrb.com link above is working for me (I think), but the lingkit one above is still showing errors, but at a different frequency.
This suggests it might be via .htaccess somehow. Weird.
I do have a .htaccess file in that part of the lingkit site, but it doesn't explain why it would be messing up the URL like that.
I wonder if what's happening might be that .htaccess is horribly misconfigured so that by having any .htaccess at all it causes problems. This is obviously still something that needs to be fixed, but at least it is maybe narrowing down the problem??

Here's the lingkit .htaccess in /wiki:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wiki
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/index.php$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/index.php/
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [L]

Note that I disabled (commented out) the actual rewriting (this was yesterday, I gave up trying to fix that part of the site for a while because of this) so it shouldn't actually be DOING anything. But maybe by having .htaccess it is causing problems?

I'm still looking for pages on other sites that are also having problems...

Edit 2:
Ah, here's a page that still has problems:
http://thebrb.com/nothing/problem
Neither /nothing nor /problem exist.
And there's no .htaccess going on at all (removed in the root, no .htaccess files within /thebrb.com/).
So that can't explain it. It looks like it interacts with .htaccess but isn't caused by it.
It also looks like "more complicated" URLs (or perhaps "more non-existent" multi-level 404 requests) cause more problems...??

[traq]

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /wiki/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/index.php$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/index.php/
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?%{QUERY_STRING} [L]
#RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [L]

responding to various points:

changes to htaccess files are immediate. there's nothing to wait for before your changes take effect.
(When I mentioned "changes not propagated yet" earlier, I was referring to any changes to the actual apache vhost configuration, which is what assigning document roots via goDaddy's CP [should] do. There's no reason those changes shouldn't be immediate as well, but I can imagine them being lazy about it.)

Directory names with dots also shouldn't be a problem (at least, on a Linux server) but again: it's goDaddy. I have no idea what kind of hacky crap they might pull behind the scenes.

Multiple name servers (or maybe load balancers): That's a possibility I hadn't thought of. If there was a problem syncing your changes (or some changes they made, say, three months ago), then that could explain why it's intermittent. Unfortunately, this is something they would have to check (and I doubt they would).

[djr33]

First, thanks for catching my typo. Actually that appears to be the problem with the lingkit wiki. I was resurrecting some old code (that I DO think worked like that, but maybe I'm wrong) from before this was, for a couple years, on a Windows server.
[There is, if you check it, a big problem with PHP versions, so I need to update some of the code. In the big picture, that's a small problem, which I will deal with later.]

So now it seems like maybe .htaccess is unrelated to the problem, although it can have issues caused by it sometimes.
Of course I do expect it to still have the issue when the server's reported URL is wrong, but since it's inconsistently inconsistent I can't confirm that. At the moment it seems to be working.


As for the rest, strange. What makes the most sense to you as a next step? I suppose I can just set a 404 page for each domain and hope that any issues don't disrupt it like they did before. But I imagine it'll keep being a problem once in a while... inconsistently.


Maybe it's something as simple as their default 404 page having some odd typo in the code. But that wouldn't explain why it (I think) messes with .htaccess sometimes.