If 777 is not allowed, 766 might do also.
Check the release notes for the list of chmod's to do.

i have now managed to compelete the chmod using an ftp client (so who knows what was happening before when i couldn't do this).

I'm now getting (after some considerable pause)...

'Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.'

this doesn't look like an XOOPS error report and..

two other thoughts
a) is there a way to login and access the admin backend so i can switch debug mode on?
b) if i navigate to http://www.colournation.com/modules/system/admin.php
the link just times out. I think I'm right in saying that normally i should see a 'sorry you don't have permission' message immediately doing this and if i'm not then this suggests the problem may not be with XOOPS but with the server itself (this is reenforced by what appears to be a non XOOPS error above).

ideas?

Andrew

[edit ghia: removed emailaddress for privacy and spam]

Finally after hours on the phone thye host has admited that this is a server fault issue.

If anyone else has a similar problem this was proved by creating a test .php file and then trying to access it from the website. When it did nothing and evenutually timed out to the same 'Internal Server Error' we knew that this was not an XOOPS problem but a server problem.

Until I see my website back and live I won't assume a fix but this is a big step forward. It's easy for the host company to blame the script (and difficult for us to be sure it's not the script).

Andrew

MY site is still down after 7 days!!

FastHosts my hosting provider know taht the problem appears to be their server but aren't finding a solution as yet.

I've therefore had to do what I can at my end to ensure a) I have compelete backups and b) see if i can get xampplite running on my local machine to prove i haven't lost my entire XOOPS site 5 years in the building.

I'll document the main steps incase they help anyone and in the hope you can get me past the latest hurdel.

1) I needed to get the latest dump of my sql database to esnure i hadn't lost the database in this fiasco. I do not have php running so could not use this route to get a backup. Finally I found MySQL Administrator a windows software program that would download the database for me. This gave me a 40meg file.
2) I installed xampplite to create a test server on my windows vista home premium system. This worked ok. (gives you php and sql etc test server)
3) You cannot upload sql dumps which are larger than 16 meg in phpmyadmin (a problem I'd encountered before) BIG shout out to http://www.rusiczki.net/2007/01/24/sql-dump-file-splitter/ who found a little app which will split an sql dump you have previously backedup. (Everyone seems to suggest using bigdump.php but this only works on the server not with an existing sql backup dump or when php is not working). This split my database into four files (1xtables and 3xdata) which allowed me to load it on to my localhost server in parts small enough for myphpadmin to cope with.

4) my problem now is that I'm getting....
Quote:

This error. I guessed this is because somehow no user has been setup for the database. XOOPS manifile.php has my password and username used for the database before. The host is set to 'localhost' but the connection is failing.

In xampplite/phpmyadmin/ i have tried to edit config.inc.php which i think may be where this user data should be held?

Quote:

I'm not sure if this is where the database user should be managed? or indeed if the db user is actually the problem here.

**fixed** changed the mainfile.php user name to root (the user already shown in MYSQLADMIN for the test server and .... my site popped back up on the test server. THANK GOD!! Now I at least i know i have a fully working site and can change hosts if i need to.

Andrew

Any ideas?

Try rename/delete the .htaccess file in web-root. (if there is one)

thanks for the tip and yes we have tried that but it didn't work. There seems to be some problem with php. There was a problem with php for the whole server which has now been fixed for everyone else but it hasn't fixed my problem.

Andrew