My Blog Site Was Down and the Russian River’s Mouth Has Opened Up

Friday September 30, 2016 Guerneville CA.

Site Down

When I returned home after my trip to Boonville I found a couple emails that said there was something wrong with my blog site with an access denied page showing.

Phoned my ISP

I tried to go there and sure enough, I was also locked out. I phoned my ISP’s support which was real backed up, which was usual for Sonic.net as they try real hard to give good customer service.

Nothing suspicious

When I finally got to a tech, he said my site was locked by support for abuse reasons, which usually means someone gets into a site and uses it for not good things. He said to go to the site’s directory and have a look around for bad stuff.  This means looking at any folders that had modifications for the date of the last couple of days. I used a free program called Filezilla to check things out and found nothing suspicious.

That meant I had to call support again as I thought I was still locked out of my blog stuff.

Well, to cut it short, it took another day to find out I could remove the .htaccess file and do things to the Word Press files in my directory at my ISP, Sonic.net.

Got another error

So I lifted the access restriction, but then got another error which I didn’t understand, even after I looked at what it was pointing me to.

Dumping files

Next I dumped all the files in Word Press, except my contents folder, which has all my blogs in it. Then I put a new copy of the Word Press files and folders into the Sonic.net directory, which is mine.

Same old error

Still the same error so I had to think a minute or maybe it was all day while I was out kayaking at Jenner.

Headed to the forums for help

I decided I’d have to go to Sonic.net’s forums and post a message with the problems I was having and hope for some help which I did last night.

River’s mouth opened up last night

Checked this morning and no help yet, so I went down to Jenner to kayak for the day. When I arrived it was real windy and the river’s mouth had just opened up by itself last night.

Checked the forums when I got home and no help yet, so I decided to try and get the backup copies Sonic.net stores, but had to figure out where they were on the server first. I found the copies and copied all the stuff to the Word Press site, except the contents folder which has my blogs. I removed the .htaccess blocking file and tried to get to my site, but got the same error message I was getting before, so I went outside and puttered for a bit, until this evening.

My next move was to try to install a fresh copy of Word Press at my Sonic.net site still using my old contents folder. I don’t like to move the contents folder around as it’s huge and would take a long time to move as it’s full of all my daily photos.

Sonic.net came through

When I came in the house this evening, I checked the forum again and as you can see a Sonic.net support guy fixed me up.

The problem turned out to be the Word Press software needed version five of Apache which is the software they use to run their servers, but they only run 4 something and a file was needed to full Word Press that wasn’t there because when I removed the .htaccess file, I didn’t reinstate the old one that had the right information on it. I remember having that same problem when I originally installed Word Press.

So things are mostly working again except some sidebar plugins that I need to get installed again.

I’m glad that’s behind me as I want to get going on another trip as winter is approaching fast.

I need to resupply and do a few things and then I should be able to get on the road again.

One of the things I need to do is get another eighty miles on the van’s new engine so I can change the oil and filter and the break in will be complete. A little shopping using the van should do that.

So,…….. Nice day.