NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

D C Krook wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I'm having some trouble debugging a client's phpBB system.
> 
> All the tables under a 'phpbb' database seem to be set up, and all the 
> files for managing the forum are in place.  I have confirmed this by 
> 'mysqldump'ing his database and source'ing it into mine, and copying his 
> files to my local machine; everything works for me locally.
> 
> The problem that he is seeing is that he gets a blank page on what 
> should be the forum homepage.  Here are the steps I've taken to isolate 
> the problem to no avail:
> 
> - set error_reporting(E_ALL);
> - added the following to the .htaccess in the directory (httpd.conf is 
> configured to allow me to do this) php_value error_reporting 7
> - tailed the Apache error_log
> - scanned httpd.conf for access restrictions.  I can echo text on this 
> index page.
> - separately tested for globals and noted that they were on, I was able 
> to toggle this in .htaccess with the following flag: php_value 
> register_globals 1
> - stripped the ampersand suppression of mysql errors in the database 
> abstraction class.
> - successfully used the stock phpMyAdmin from his host, under his 
> webroot, to connect to this database.
> - connected to MySQL via the command line client as root, the default 
> site user, and the phpBB user.
> - Googled for "blank page phpBB", which throws up a lot of false hits 
> because phpBB is the default forum for many online PHP related 
> discussions of blank pages.
> - Perused the Knowledge Base at http://phpbb.com/kb/
> 
> 
> I'm not quite sure what other tests I can carry out to isolate the 
> problem.  Is there anything obvious that I'm missing?

Nothing obvious, but here are a couple crazy ideas:

-- put MySQL into logging mode and tail -f mysql.log to what, if any, queries are getting run.  You should be able to map those queries back into the code and see exactly where it's dieing.

-- while watching the apache error logs, a trigger_error('TEST'); is visible?  Just be sure the PHP logs aren't going somewhere else.


HTH,

H