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Admin Tools

#21311 Same Problem as reported in Ticket #21309

Posted in ‘Admin Tools for Joomla! 4 & 5’
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Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
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Admin Tools version
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Latest post by nicholas on Tuesday, 28 October 2014 12:37 CDT

ThBergmann
 Hello Nicholas,
when checking admintools in the backend I got the message that a file is corrupted. The file-checker said that a file named dispatcher.php or something like that would be tampered. I Just remember this filename, dont know the path. Then I did a complete new install of admintools without deinstalling something before.
Now I have no access to my website. Neither frontend nor backend. Only a blank page is shown.
The system is functioning when I disable the admintools by renaming the main.php in the plugins/.... directory into main-disable.php.

Do you know what to do ?

Regards

Thomas

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Redownload version 3.3.1 and install the new package. There was a packaging error. The first 100 or so people who upgraded / downloaded Admin Tools 3.3.1 got the dispatcher.php file with the wrong signature. If you download Admin Tools 3.3.1 right now you'll get the correct package.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

ThBergmann
Hello Nicholas,

I downloaded the admintools package again and installed it, but this did not solve the problem. The website is only available when disabling the admintools by renaming the main.php file into main-disable.php Otherwise only a blank page is shown in the browser (I use Firefox Version 33.0)
Do you have any other ideas ?

sunny regards
Thomas

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
A white page or a page with a 500 Internal Server Error is, in fact, either a .htaccess issue to a PHP fatal error in disguise.

First, let's see if it is a .htaccess issue. Try renaming the .htaccess file in your site's root to htaccess.bak If there is a .htaccess file in the site's administrator directory, try renaming it as well. If that solves the problem, the issue was with a directive in your .htaccess file. We'd like to recommend you to try removing directives from your .htaccess until you find the one which causes the problem.

If that doesn't help, the error you are receiving is in fact a PHP error in disguise. First, check your server's error logs (not the access logs) immediately after visiting the page which throws the error. There should be an exact description of the PHP fatal error which occurred. Sometimes you can find the error messages in files called error_log or error.log inside the site's root and/or administrator directories. If unsure about the error log location, please consult your host. Most likely the error logs are available in your site's cPanel, Plesk control panel or similar hosting account management facility.

If your host does not give you access to the error logs and you have access to the Joomla! administrator area, please log in to your site's back-end, go to Global Configuration, click on the Server tab and set the Error Reporting to Maximum (Joomla! 1.5) or Development (Joomla! 2.x and later). Try visiting the problem page again.

If you still get a blank page, edit your configuration.php file and put the following code right after the final closing curly brace ( this is what a curly brace looks like --> } ) but before the closing PHP tag (it looks like ?> that is a question mark and a greater-than sign):
ini_set( 'display_errors', true );
error_reporting( E_ALL ); 
Try visiting the problem page again.

If you still get a white page, please remote the two lines from your configuration.php file. Edit the .htaccess file in your site's root. If you don't have a file named .htaccess create a new one. Beware that htaccess.txt is a DIFFERENT FILE and will NOT work! Add the following to the end of the file:
php_flag display_errors On
php_value error_reporting 32767
and retry loading the problem page.

If you still get a white page, remove the two lines from your .htaccess file. Now, create a file called php.ini with the following content:
display_errors=on
error_reporting=E_ALL
and upload it into your site's root and your site's administrator directory. Retry loading the problem page.

IMPORTANT: Sometimes the error won't show. Edit your configuration.php and find the line starting with public $error_reporting and set it to:
public $error_reporting = 'development';

This instructs Joomla! to enable maximum error, warnings and notices verbosity. In 99.9% of cases it will result in the error messages being shown on the browser.

Please note that if you can not understand what the PHP error message means, just copy and paste it here verbatim so that we can take a look and point you to the right direction.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

ThBergmann
OK, I found the solution.

I used Firebug to get a first impression what is going wrong.
I disabled the .htaccess file in the main directory - that was NOT the reason, but Firebug told me there is a 500 internal Server error.
Then i disabled admintools,
Enabled error reporting in Joomla - set to "development"
Enabled admintools again and got this nice error message:

Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'MaxMind\Db\Reader\InvalidDatabaseException' with message 'Error opening database file (/HIDDENPATH/plugins/system/akgeoip/lib/../db/GeoLite2-Country.mmdb). Is this a valid MaxMind DB file?' in /HIDDENPATH/plugins/system/akgeoip/lib/vendor/maxmind-db/reader/src/MaxMind/Db/Reader.php:262 Stack trace: #0 /HIDDENPATH/plugins/system/akgeoip/lib/vendor/maxmind-db/reader/src/MaxMind/Db/Reader.php(61): MaxMind\Db\Reader->findMetadataStart('/HIDDENPATH...') #1 /HIDDENPATH/plugins/system/akgeoip/lib/vendor/geoip2/geoip2/src/GeoIp2/Database/Reader.php(56): MaxMind\Db\Reader->__construct('/HIDDENPATH...') #2 /HIDDENPATH/plugins/system/akgeoip/lib/akgeoip.php(33): GeoIp2\Database\Reader->__construct('/HIDDENPATH...') #3 /HIDDENPATH/plugins/system/admintools/feature/geoblock.php(36): AkeebaGeoipProvider->__co in /HIDDENPATH/plugins/system/akgeoip/lib/vendor/maxmind-db/reader/src/MaxMind/Db/Reader.php on line 262


Please note that I replaced the real path with the Word HIDDENPATH.

This pointed me to the fact, that the geoprovider plugin could be the bad thing here. I downloaded the plugin again from your website and installed it without deinstalling something before. Just had to disable admintools of course to get access to the backend.

And finally thats it! Everything is working fine again. Just looked if the plugin was activated ( = Yes, it was.)

I dont know the reason, what has confused my installation. The GeoProvider Plugin never caused trouble before.

Thank you for your help.

Ticket can be closed.

Thomas

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
If the problem appears again your host might be deleting it automatically. I've seen that behaviour in some (usually low quality) hosts which have a very sensitive "malware scanner" script. I put this in quotation marks because they end up automatically renaming or deleting legitimate files whereas real malware evades their detection just fine. I know that because they were also removing the jfscan.php file of Admin Tools Professional. My workaround to prevent these hosts from deleting it was to encode the parts of the file triggering the protections... using the same methods real crackers use to encode their malicious scripts to evade detection. Astonishingly, once my legitimate file started resembling real world malware the "malware scanner" stopped detecting it as malware. I count that as an epic fail for the so-called "malware scanners" :D

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

ThBergmann
Nice to know, that hackers code most likely is "good stuff" ....
Perhaps you may have made some experiences with low cost providers, in my case I dont think the provider is the problem. I am reselling the webspace to own customers :-) I know my provider personally and I also know, that he is making a good job ... for over 7 years now.

I have many Joomla Installations online and had to learn something the hard way. Joomla is a wonderful CMS. But it sometimes needs some attention to keep an installation secure. Your Tools are really a MUSTHAVE for every Joomla website admin.

So keep up the good work :-)

Thomas

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Thank you, Thomas!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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