dead / white pages

[Kohai]

Greetz!

While looking around, I was getting LOTS of 'white pages', which nearly always means an error in your PHP syntax somewhere. A 'white page' is the PHP equivalent of a BSOD... just a blank page with no SOURCE when you do VIEW SOURCE in your browser.

Most likely place to cause a problem is a leading space before the first <?php or a trailing space after the last ?> in one of your files. It happens if you don't use a pure text editor, or you accidentally hit the spacebar. Editing PHP on a Mac will also cause trouble due to the difference in line terminators (been there, done that, got the t-shirt AND the board game!)

Dunno an easy way to solve it, sorry. If you check your site ERROR LOG you might get a hint. Also, if you have errors enabled you might see something named 'error_log' if you browse the directory tree for your server... that will have any PHP errors, but I've seen 'em scattered to hell and gone ALL around a directory tree. On shared hosts, they'll drop that file wherever the interpreter thinks the error happened, USUALLY where your index.php file is but possibly also where the styles/themes are.

It could also be your host playing around with the PHP.ini settings.

 

[BurntOut]

It is actually a ddos attack on the forum. We are doing what we can to stop it :\.

 

[Kohai]

My condolences...

wish I could help, but most of what I know about locking down a forum is to keep the hacker kiddies out, and you can't stop DoS attacks from the .htaccess file. You really need to do a DROP on the Apache security files that your host controls to stop it. That'll cut the traffic back, but it's hard to get most shared hosts to accommodate you.

Luck to you!

edit: looking at your location, I'd guess a botnet that's being controlled from someone there in the Middle-East that doesn't *like* you.