Server reloaded with WHM/cPanel-Dolphin crying 500

Believe me, that was the last thing I wanted to do; it is not my server so the owners have the final say.  I had a beautiful piece of kit, Nginx/PHP-FPM, and it ran like a dream; I feel like I have lost a child.  Now I am saddle with WHM/cPanel and I still have the same opinions of it as I have voiced before.  I hate the way it handles accounts.  I won't go into details why the owners wanted it switched over but as I said, they were the owners and it was their sever.

Now, I have loaded the site files and database to the server; set up an account for the site.  I have the standard Dolphin .htaccess in place.  I edited the header.inc.php file to point to the new site root.  Well, I think I pointed it to the correct site root.  I am from the world without control panels; the most I run is webmin.  I assume the site root is the root of the cPanel account  /home/user/public_html; or is the root from the actual path of the account?  Anyway, I am getting a 500 Server error.

Now, I did not set this server up, it was reloaded by the datacentre.  I will run easyApache to check the php configuration.  My question about easyApache is what should or should not be included for Dolphin to run properly.  I am from working with php.ini and the pools of php-fpm; so if you can guide me a bit on this easyApache animal, I will check that out.

Anything else I need to check on this WHM/cPanel beast?

Try this...

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

change everything that says AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All

save and close then

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

 That directory is not there.  This is a CentOS 6.5 setup.  Where else would the apache2 directory be?

OK, I think I need /etc/httpd/

edit: No, on this setup there is no default file.

Should suEXEC be enabled or disabled?

OK, found the key, it was the php handler.  I changed to cgi and I got the nice mbstring error message.  What is recommended for the php handler to be set to?

It is late and I think I will run easyApache tomorrow when I am fresh and not falling asleep on my keyboard.

In the meanwhile you can leave me info anything that I need to be aware of with this new setup when I reconfig Apache/PHP tomorrow.

Another question:

Question, I hate how cPanel sets the roots.  I want to set up my test account in the same cPanel account.  Would you go in and change the root in:

/var/cpanel/userdata/USERNAME/DOMAIN.COM setting the root to the directory that is currently holding Dolphin, or would you add a redirect such as:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !subdirectory/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ subdirectory/$1 [L]

Is one better than the other?  I have added redirects on shared hosting where I could not edit the files.

 me too! Tomorrow, bright and early.

They always say to "sleep on it."

I bet you will feel better in the morning.

I am inclined to change the document root instead of doing a redirect.

From what I read, suPHP does not allow php directives in .htaccess; so perhaps that was the cause of the 500 error.

Dolphin .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_php4.c>
    php_flag register_globals Off
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_php5.c>
    php_flag allow_url_include Off
    php_flag register_globals Off
</IfModule>

So Apache people, what do you recommend that I set the php handler to?  I want to get this site back up as soon as possible.

Edit: Found this at the cPanel forum; Note: If you use suPHP as your PHP handler, extensions that handle caching (such as EAccelerator and XCache) will not provide any benefits on your server.

Not all directives in the .htaccess file will cause a 500 error. Those will not. All dolphin sites have them.

However what will is this.

if you switched from a site that uses normal unix file permissions to fastcgi or suphp then if the permissions are wrong you will get server errors. The permissions have to be set properly based on the PHP handler used.

See the docs here. http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/wiki/DetailedInstall for what the permissions should be and how to change them via a shell.

I normally run PHP as an apache module. Simply because that is the default on most linux installs. FastCGI i hear is the better one. SUPHP for security but it the slowest of them all.

The differences are covered in these docs. http://www.boonex.com/trac/dolphin/wiki/HostingServerSetupRecommendations

The question I have is if you run suPHP; which was the default on the server when I got it back, will the directives in the .htaccess just be ignored?  In my case, it was the suPHP handler that caused the 500.  I am new to this easyApache thing so I went though and checked the things that I thought was needed for Dolphin to run; such as XLS for the forum.

Here is another question, when you install Dolphin, it asks for ImageMagick to be installed; I will have to check but I will bet that it is not installed.  Will imageMagick need to be on the server for Dolphin?

  imagemagick is an alternative to GD

Here is a new one on this adventure:

MySQL Error

Access denied for user 'user'@'localhost' to database 'database'

user and database are not the actual values, I changed that in posting.  Since I created the database and assigned the user and assigned the privileges, could this be from something I did wrong in easyApache?

Maybe it is not localhost on this server?  I fairly new to this world of WHM/cPanel.

Yes, directives in between the <IfModule tags will be ignored.

As i said, all dolphin sites have those and they do not cause problems. I have run on servers with suPHP before.

If directives are specified outside the <IfModule tags, then they can cause a problem.

The 500 was probably due to a misconfiguration on the server.  I have run easyApache and gone through the list and I think I loaded what was needed for Dolphin. 

Here is a question for the users of WHM/cPanel.  Can I configure PHP by editing the php.ini file directly?  I know that you can not edit the Apache directly as it will be overwritten by the control panel.  The php configuration editor I am seeing in WHM is very limited in settings.

Normally, I have always made changes directly to the php.ini file because, yes the configurator sucks. This new server was the first time I ran easyapache, and except for a small glitch (that I found was my error. which was corrected by Zarcon and his crew) everything was pretty straightforward. I especially love how APC and eAccelerator are part of the easy apache build (depending on what php version you use) so I did not have to do the acceleration manually.

Coming from NGINX to Apache I can imagine the confusion. attached is my current easyapache profile build.

Database connect error was a mistype.  I am not use to the cPanel prefix of account name to such things as database user and database name.

thanks for this thread.
i have solved my problem.

thanks a lot.