Forum Moderators: coopster
I am running a website using php5 and it is also very much mysqli based. On the shared hosted server that I'm on, I require 'SetEnv DEFAULT_PHP_VERSION 5' in the htaccess.
For 99.999% of the time the website is problem free but every so often a random 403 forbidden message comes up for any of the logged in site members. A couple of days go by - nothing, then the odd one or a couple of 'forbiddens' within a few minutes.
The site is integrated with phpBB3 (latest version and no mods) also using mysqli. The errors can come up on anything - no pattern of page change, posting or viewing at all. The rest of the site is integrated with phpBB for registration, log ins and sessions etc. Error messages can randomly come up, with no pattern, on these other pages also.
I have an htaccess blocking some IPs and suchlike in the public directory. Included in the htaccess are the custom error page settings but the error pages when they come up are bog standard, white 'Forbidden' ones. The log files show these random 403s in the user log but none show in the error log. From what I can see and by running the site without htaccess for a while, these are not somehow being generated by that file.
On getting the error page, a quick browser refresh usually gets the user straight into the 'forbidden' requested page. I changed browsers to see if it was IE7 but it happens with Firefox and Opera as well.
I have been on to phpBB and got the general answer "It's a server problem!" and I've been onto the server support team who are at a total loss of what may be causing it. They did suggest that I reinstalled the whole shooting match but as I had already updated nearly every page outside of the phpBB directory and still got errors here, that did not seem a way to go.
I am also at a total loss as to why the website is perfectly well behaved and then throws very random errors. I've come onto here in the hope that somebody may be able to point me in some direction in trying to pin down the cause as it is driving me round the bend trying to figure it out.
I've got a sneaky idea that it's cron related - I could be totally wrong but since 17/10, there have been 7 of this type of 403 error -
17/10 - 20:55:16
18/10 - 21:55:20
18/10 - 19:55:15
22/10 - 14:55:19
22/10 - 15:15:20
23/10 - 20:45:20
23/10 - 22:25:19
No others have occurred outside of that *5 minutes past pattern. Also, the seconds fall within a narrow band.
Could server cron jobs affect my shared host site - my site is mysqli driven and has php5 set in an htaccess set env.
If this seems like straw clutching - that's because it is.
No, no file restrictions like that - it happens both within the forum (with its own file structure) as well as outside with a different structure and set of calls. Plus Google doesn't report any restrictions that it might have found, the site's being spidered without any problems.
It happened to me again, this afternoon - 55 minutes past the hour - I think it must be cron related somewhere - either server-wise or maybe phpBB-wise but as I have said, it happens in site areas outside of phpbb. PhpBB is only integrated with the rest of the site as far as sessions and logins are concerned - the databases are totally separate.
