Trisha Cornelius

Figuring it out as I go

Miscellany

New Year’s Day Technical Trouble: Fixing the White Screen of Death caused by WordFence

Hello Blog,

On New Year’s I decided to write my new year’s wish, and when I came to visit my site it gave me the white screen of death (WSOD).  (For the blessedly uninitiated, the white screen of death refers to the empty browser window filled with white instead of your WordPress installation). My reaction was along the line of: “Seriously! Exactly two years ago my site was down like this. I am through with [REDACTED hosting company name]”. New Year’s day is a difficult day for me, being the anniversary of my dad’s death. But, unlike two years ago I felt that I could do my own technical support. I settled in to fix my blog. Step zero was making a complete backup of the server.

My first port of call was to start a technical support chat with the hosting company’s technical support. (Based on issues I have had along the way with them I was not entirely unconvinced that they had messed up. Spoiler: they hadn’t) So, the helpful guy on the other end of the chat had a quick look and came back with the verdict that it looked like WordFence was causing issues on my site.

It is definitely prudent to run a Web Application Firewall (WAF) on any WordPress site at the moment, but I admit my frustration that my site’s downtime was caused by the very thing that is meant to protect it. I have neither reached out to WordFence, nor looked through their documentation, in order to see whether I was just particularly unlucky or there is a known issue that was causing the particular crash.

Once I established that WordFence was the issue I went into my cPanel (you can just as easily do it through an FTP client) and began renaming the plugin folder. This gave me some progress, instead of getting a WSOD I instead got the error message:

Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 
Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0 
Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required '*/wordfence-waf.php' (include_path='.:/opt/cpanel/ea-php70/root/usr/share/pear') in Unknown on line 0

This meant that I had something to Google which led me to find that WordFence adds some php to the user.ini file, and that I needed to delete:

php_value auto_prepend_file '/home/public_html/wordfence-waf.php'

from it. Thank you to wfasa for her reply on a ticket in the WordPress.org support thread which allowed me to figure this out.

That should have taken care of the initial error, but when I tried to access my site again (even after clearing my browser’s cache) I got that same error.  Between myself and the  support agent, we figured that W3TC might be presenting the cached error messages instead of the site. And so, next step in this mission was to disable W3TC without having access to the /wp-admin dashboard.

This was where things got slightly more technical. Firstly, because I needed access to the .htaccess file I needed to change my control panel’s settings to view hidden files. My Google-fu took me to a helpful post by Journal Xtra on how to remove W3TC manually. I was battling to get his fix to work with my wp-config.php permission set to 755 so I decreased the permissions to 644 (I don’t have sufficient server side knowledge to know if this was a bizarre quirk, something related to the cPanel issues I was having due to my Firefox preferences of opening links in a new tab (eventually I was doing the technical things in Chrome), or something unrelated that got tweaked along the way). After permissions were set to 644 and I had deleted:

  • w3-total-cache-config.php
  • db.php
  • advanced-cache.php

I edited my .htaccess to remove the blocks of code inserted by both WordFence and W3TC. This was made easy and stress free by the fact that I had done a complete backup of the files on the server before I started tinkering and that the code inserted into the .htaccess by both plugins was clearly commented out.

Finally, when I refreshed my site and was greeted by my WordPress installation. I then eventually, hours after I had planned to was able to write my post).

[Sidenote: When I rename files or folders like this I literally append _renamed to the folder or file because it changes the path and makes it super easy to find what you have changed. When you are doing this type of thing you really should keep track of what you are changing for two reasons, one so you can replicate the fix in the future and two so you can undo the fix in the present if you mess something up. ]

Love and fixing my own stuff,
Trisha

A New Year’s Wish for 2018 and some bits about grief

Hello world,

This is something that I shamelessly stole from Neil Gaiman. The idea of a New Year’s wish, even though this year he did not make a wish for us:

I still have a wish, on this difficult day. My wish for 2018 is that you find your balance. May you find the balance between taking care of yourself and looking out for others. May you find the balance between the frost and the fire. May you find the balance between fighting fights that need to be fought and walking away so that you are not always fighting.  May you find the way to channel our destructive emotions into useful things and use it to find your balance.

Love and balance,
Trisha

P.S. As I typed the wish I realized how much of this was inspired by Sir Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith and I Shall Wear Midnight.

***

Today marks two years since my dad was murdered. This time two years ago I was getting ready to spend the night at my parents-in-law’s house after I had come to my childhood home and seen that the horror of the truth of a phone call that I hoped was a terrible mistake was a harsh reality. And so, on this difficult day I am grateful for music that helps me feel. The specific song that called to me now was Song for my Father by Kim Boekbinder. A haunting piece of music, whose lyrics I identify with:

In between me and you
are a million points of light,
I’ve cast them up into a darkening sky.
You can follow them to me
when you are lost or you are free
and I will wait here, I will wonder why.

I don’t presume to know the meaning that Kim Boekbinder intended, but I know that for me the idea that my dad tossed up a million points of light into the darkening sky to guide me is comforting. Death doesn’t end relationships, it changes them to be one sided and made up of memories and interpretations. I was always a daddy’s girl. Ironically after I became a mother I now identify more strongly with her and understand her more, but she is also gone, but naturally (even though suddenly as well).

And I know in the music and the memories I will always find my dad.

Love and grief,
Trisha

I’m back

Hello blog!

It’s been a while. So let me catch you up: At the beginning of 2017, I wrote that I thought that I might have burnt out. I was wrong. I did not burn out. I was ill. My GP picked up the fact that I had a goitre on my thyroid (which is just a fancy way of saying that it was enlarged) and referred me to a specialist. The specialist with the help of a detailed ultrasound and blood tests made a diagnosis of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis which meant that my body was attacking my thyroid resulting in fatigue, joint pain, brain fog and a myriad of other symptoms. We decided that the best option in my case was to have a complete thyroidectomy. On, the 4th of April I went into the Wits Donald Gordon Medical Centre to have surgery. I am incredibly grateful that I am in the position to have a good medical aid and the resources to afford private health care.  The surgery changed my life for the better, I was immediately able to breathe better and my energy level improved dramatically.

In the meantime, my quest for justice in my father’s killing continues. I am glad that I have a solid support system, a legal background (including inquests) and a great therapist.

I started tutoring Computer Applications Technology at the beginning of the year. I am appalled by the way that our policy is not keeping up to date with the technologies. Textbooks and student guides should not be referring to deprecated HTML. It felt like I was going back in history to the days of the browser wars. I am glad to have had this experience though even if I have needed to teach computer history and then the modern implement. I know that teenagers have a terrible reputation, but interacting with these ones has reinforced my view that they have an amazing perspective.

We went on an amazing road trip as a family for three weeks where we touched on six of nine provinces in South Africa and travelled over five thousand kilometres during September. I will post pictures and stories soon.

Now, I am back in Cape Town for WordCamp. I am hoping to do some more blogging soon.

 

Self-care is the antithesis of selfishness

I have been doing a lot of reading in the last while about selfishness and self-care, and the fact that while it is good to be selfless in an emergency situation once the emergency is over one should revert to proper self-care.

Taking care of myself was not a priority in twenty-sixteen. There were other more important things that needed my attention. I have started looking at how to take better care of myself in twenty-seventeen. The two biggest things that are going to help me with that is that I have help. My amazing housekeeper is back from maternity leave, and I have more help with child care.

I have also been reflecting on why it was so much easier to keep the house clean while we lived in Costa Rica and immediately after we returned. I have come to the conclusion that it was a case of us having less stuff and because of that being better organized. It is a challenge to get rid of stuff, especially when there are memories linked to the stuff, but sometimes you can hold onto the memories but let go of the stuff.

And so in the weeks to come I am probably going to be letting go of more stuff. Keeping the high quality, useful things and letting go of the rest and I am looking forward to it.

 

Hello 2017

The last two months have been an incredibly tough time for me. I am a bit cross with myself for not acknowledging that it was going to be so tough. For not blocking out 19  November to 16 January as being a difficult time and marking it off for self-care. But as life goes on, I live and learn.

It was my first Christmas as an orphan…but I am grateful that I have an amazing chosen family, my in-laws and my child’s God Parents. That I have people who I can be honest with, that will let me have a good cry on the couch and then bring me tea and cheerfully joke with me, and love me at my best and worst, and every stage in between.

I don’t know if I just got burnt out. It is inadvisable to be working, worrying about a police investigation, supervising an estate’s executor, organising a conference, grieving, mommying a toddler, managing a house while your helper is on maternity leave, being a wife and I am sure there is something else without having more help. But this is changing. My mind is foggy, my body strained. But I survived, and 2017 is off to a much better start than 2016.

Twenty-sixteen was the most difficult year of my life, and I think that it might be the year that I learnt the most from. I did not achieve the goals that I set out to, but then life happened in a different way and I got other stuff done instead.

I have a top secret list of things that I want to achieve this year (and include the reason that I am writing a blog post twenty minutes before midnight on a Saturday night). I don’t know if I will manage a fraction of it. What I do know is this. I would rather try and fail than succeed at not showing up.

WordCamp Johannesburg is happening!

Hello friends,

wapuuWordCamp is a global but community organized conference about all things WordPress.  WordCamp Johannesburg is happening on Friday 18 November and Saturday 19 November 2016 at the BON Hotel in Midrand.

A WordCamp is a great opportunity to connect with other people who use WordPress. At the moment about a quarter of website’s on the Internet are powered by WordPress. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that WordPress makes publishing accessible to the masses and has removed the barrier of technical knowledge to running your own website.

WordCamps are for everyone who uses WordPress whether you simply have a toe in the water by just starting a blog or are a high-end developer contributing to the core software that makes WordPress great.

I was lucky enough to attend WordCamp Cape Town this year (I will blog about it yet) and it was a wonderful experience to meet members of the community and I learned a great deal.

If you can’t make it for both days, at R250 a ticket (including food) is still worth coming for the one day! I would love to meet you at WordCamp.

Love and WordCamp Johannesburg,
Trisha

If  you would like to read more about WordCamp you can have a look at: