Hosting Issue - Has anyone experienced

Hi zip222,

No, I personally never did, but hosting companies do strange things when they update their systems.

Is it possible that someone at your client inadvertently did something and might not even know that they did it? (That's happened to me before.)

Or that someone has hacked your hosting space.

To be on the safe side, I'd suggest at the very least that you change your passwords , and I'd ask Earthlink to check into the issue.

I'm sure that others have other ideas as well.

Best,

Jerry Kornbluth

Hi zip222,

Yes, we've seen that before, and it's very annoying. Being who we are we usually get the call when web hosts break things. It doesn't happen too often but we've seen it. Lots of programs use hard coded paths so if they change their directory naming it can break lots of things.

If you use relative paths for your require_once lines they'll be more portable. Something like this:

require_once "cmsAdmin/lib/viewer_functions.php";

or to go up one directory:
require_once "../cmsAdmin/lib/viewer_functions.php";

You'll still want to go through and check the other settings. Also you might want to ask you host why they changed it or if they can make the old path work as well. Usually they can make both the old and new paths work by creating a symbolic link from the old to the new.

Hope that helps!

Hi-
One of our clients just had the same problem with earthlink changing the server path, causing blank pages.

How do we change the "Program Directory" path listed under General Settings? Is it necessary to update this if the settings.dat.php file has been changed to reflect the current path? The system seems to be working.

Yes, that's what I had to do. Fortunately it's a fairly small site and it only took a few minutes. I spoke with Earthlink about this and they "promised" it would never happen again. Yeah right! How can someone working in customer support make that statement? My guess it that this is standard procedure for them.

Hi there!
I am having the same issue on one of my client's sites that is hosted at NetFirms. I've updated the paths in my PHP pages but it is still calling the wrong path:

http://www.trotwoodfarm.com/horsesforsale.php

The site is still looking in: /hermes/bosweb/web142/b1420/nf.trotwoodfarm/public_html

(Program Directory in CMS is listed as: /hermes/bosweb/web142/b1420/nf.trotwoodfarm/public_html/cmsAdmin )

but the path that their server support sent to them is :

/home/users/web/b1420/nf.trotwoodfarm/public_html

This might be a server/hosting issue - I just wanted to doublecheck and make sure there's nothing on this side that can be done - outside of updating the PHP paths.
thanks!
Kelly

Hi Kelly,

Sometimes hosts are setup in such a way that they have multiple different filepaths that point to the same place.

From the looks of the error my guess is you're doing this:
include_once("/spambot-email-protector.php");

When you want this:
include_once("spambot-email-protector.php"); // no leading slash

The leading slash makes it look in the root of the server for the file. Same for require_once, try removing the leading slash.

I can't tell for sure, though. If you want to attach the horesforsale.php file I could take a look for you.

Hope that helps!

Perfect - that was what it was! thank you for your help!!
Kelly