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SecretMaster
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Does anyone have any web experience?

Fri Sep 28, 2012 9:48 am

Hey folks,

So I'm in a bit of a pickle. I'm working on an academic project and we registered a new domain with GoDaddy, and they are acting as our web-host using a Linux server. We installed a wiki to the server, but whenever we try to access it we get a 404 error:

The requested URL /wiki/index.php was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I've been asked to solve the problem, and I'm completely perplexed as to the problem. To me the error is saying "there should be this file called index.php in this directory called wiki." When I use an FTP service to log into the server, such a folder with such a file exists. So as I understand it, there is a problem with finding that folder/file. The domain/server was just set up yesterday. When I FTP in and am at the root directory, there are 3 folders and several files. cgi, stats, and wiki are the three folders present. The files present are an icon image, a php/php5.ini file, gdform and webmailer form.php file, and several .html files (welcome, missing). If type in our web address with the extension to one of those two html files, I still get a 404 error. So for example oursite.project.org/welcome.html still gives a 404 not found. I don't know if that is supposed to happen or not.

I'm completely new to any sort of web administration/work, and it honestly this is supposed to be such a minor thing that has turned into a major problem. We're a very small team and I was delegated this role, so I have to fix it. If anyone could provide any insights it would be super appreciated.
 
Flatland_Spider
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Fri Sep 28, 2012 11:15 am

My best recommendation would be to find someone IRL who can log in and help you. There are many things that could go wrong, and you're probably going to end up writing a novel.

With that being said, there's a bunch of information missing.
Do you work for the school/college/university/whatever, or are you a student?
Where is this server located (webspace at a webhost, VPS, datacenter, on a desk, under your bed)?
What wiki are you trying to install?
What is the domain name?
Was this working before you tried to setup the wiki?
 
SecretMaster
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Fri Sep 28, 2012 11:31 am

I actually just fixed the problem, although I'm still confused conceptually as to why what I did worked.

Just some background: I work for a university/am part of a research team (right now I'm a full-time technician, but will be starting a Masters next Spring). The server is hosted by GoDaddy, and I believe its a shared virtual host of sorts (that might be improper terminology). We are working with mediawiki, and I'd rather avoid giving out domains/urls for the moment as we aren't quite ready to go "live" with our project so to speak. In a few days we will. But at our core, we are a team of ecologists and I consider myself one. There are some computer heavy components of our project, but at the end of the day I'd rather be out in the field than at a computer.

So originally the url was trying to access wiki.ourproject.org/wiki/index.php and was returning a 404 error. To me that was strange because through the FTP, when I went into the /wiki folder I could see all the files, including index.php.

However if I typed in wiki.ourproject.org/index.php, the page index would load, although it was very barebones and lacking fancy formatting.

I ended up changing a line in a .php file. Originally variable $wgScriptPath was set to "/wiki". When I changed it to "" (empty space), the whole thing is up and running. I personally find that very strange and don't fully understand why, but it works and right now I couldn't be happier.

I'm just confused because in the root directory, there is a folder called wiki that contains all the files/directories to make the wiki work. To me if I change the variable ScriptPath to a blank space, wouldn't it be looking for files in the root directory instead of wiki directory? Unless the variable is relative to the wiki folder. I don't know. This is sort of fun,challenging, and frustrating. I don't think I'd ever want to do this for a living!!!
 
AntiSp4wn
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:11 pm

So /wiki, the slash there would go to the root directory of your web host. This might have been wrong because you wiki folder was likely in a public_html or www folder, thus the path was wrong. By removing it the script which was in your wiki folder now set the path for whatever else it was loading relative to the directory it was sitting in (the wiki folder)--thus stuff loaded.
 
Flatland_Spider
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Fri Sep 28, 2012 5:15 pm

SecretMaster wrote:
The server is hosted by GoDaddy, and I believe its a shared virtual host of sorts (that might be improper terminology). We are working with mediawiki, and I'd rather avoid giving out domains/urls for the moment as we aren't quite ready to go "live" with our project so to speak.


Virtualhost is correct.

Asking for the domain name was to check for network configuration problems (DNS, firewalls, etc.).

So originally the url was trying to access wiki.ourproject.org/wiki/index.php and was returning a 404 error.
<snip>
I ended up changing a line in a .php file. Originally variable $wgScriptPath was set to "/wiki". When I changed it to "" (empty space), the whole thing is up and running. I personally find that very strange and don't fully understand why, but it works and right now I couldn't be happier.

<snip>This is sort of fun,challenging, and frustrating. I don't think I'd ever want to do this for a living!!!


You're using a sub-domain, so the webroot for wiki.outproject.org is probably set to /home/user/wiki, which is why having $wgScriptPath set to "/wiki" was messing you up. In your setup, project.org/wiki is equivalent to wiki.project.org, which was tripping you up. That's a gross simplification, but it will work for the moment.

It gets easy, and boring, the more you do it, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
 
SecretMaster
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Mon Oct 01, 2012 3:02 pm

Slightly more frustration, but I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask. The webpages were loading with no issue Friday afternoon, but as of this morning I get a "server not found error." Is it possible something I changed caused this error to happen, and it just took some time to kick in? Or is this more of an ISP issue? I can FTP into the webserver and still modify files, so I imagine it is something I did.
 
morphine
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:18 pm

Well, "server not found" is usually related to DNS issues. Does the domain you registered resolve to the correct IP? Check using "nslookup wiki.yourproject.org" (Windows), or "host wiki.yourproject.org" (Linux).
There is a fixed amount of intelligence on the planet, and the population keeps growing :(
 
SecretMaster
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:36 pm

morphine wrote:
Well, "server not found" is usually related to DNS issues. Does the domain you registered resolve to the correct IP? Check using "nslookup wiki.yourproject.org" (Windows), or "host wiki.yourproject.org" (Linux).


The message I get when I use terminal to and host is 3(NXDOMAIN). So I'm guessing it doesn't know what the IP is?
 
morphine
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:39 pm

Hrm, that's weird... plug your domain in here: intodns.com - see what it tells you. Also, you can PM me the domain name if you want, I can check it out.
There is a fixed amount of intelligence on the planet, and the population keeps growing :(
 
Flatland_Spider
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:32 pm

Are you on a Mac or some other Unix/Linux machine?

Try entering the IP address of the domain into the web browser. You can get the IP address by opening a command line windows and issuing "dig @8.8.8.8 +short youdomain.org" for either OS X or Linux, or either command Morphine suggested.
 
SecretMaster
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Mon Oct 01, 2012 7:14 pm

I should update and say that Morphine helped me solve my issues. Thanks again for all the help TR, you folks rock!
 
Flatland_Spider
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Re: Does anyone have any web experience?

Tue Oct 02, 2012 1:38 pm

What was the problem, just for completeness.

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