Mint and mod_security April 15th, 2008 Recently I came across a problem in Mint that I thought I’d share a solution to. Over the past month or so, I had noticed a huge drop off in traffic on my site. At first I figured this was due to the fact that I wasn’t writing anything interesting (certainly a possibility), but I also noticed a substantial drop in Google’s organic results too. After doing more research, I noticed that only a tiny fraction of my pages were actually logging page visits to the database, and the rest were returning 503 errors, saying that the service was unavailable.
Basically, people were visiting the site, but Mint was not able to record the visitor information because it was being rejected by my server. After talking with the DreamHost support staff, it was determined that mod_security was probably to blame. Mod_security is basically an add-on for my webserver that protects against folks running attacks (usually through malicious javascript), but can also sometimes shut down normal services such as my Mint tracking software.
I was able to turn it off in the control panel, but I also had to add the following to my . htaccess in my wordpress folder (which for me is the root level of the server): <IfModule mod_security.c> SecFilterEngine Off SecFilterScanPOST Off SecFilterCheckURLEncoding Off </IfModule> After saving the updated file, I was able to view statistics for all of the pages on my site. I honestly have no idea what caused this to start happening – maybe the upgrade to WordPress 2.5 was the culptrit. I hope this helps anyone who is experiencing similar problems.
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Anthony says: April 15th, 2008 at 2: 11 pm Where did you learn your web know-how from Was it Full Sail Thanks Daniel says: April 15th, 2008 at 2: 23 pm Sure, some of it was from Full Sail. But the web changes way too quick to say that you learned everything from any one place. It’s mainly a combination of buying lots of books about the web, poking around sites I like to see how they did what they did, and generally experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t. Are you looking to attend Full Sail If so, I wrote a few articles about it here: [link] [link] Leave a Reply Posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 10: 16 am and filed under html.
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