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29 08 2007

Bizarre Wordpress bug?

Posted by: claudio in en, paranoia, wtf

Bizarre bug of the day: I just can’t post the following snippet of code in Wordpress 2.2.1 running in Dreamhost:

        if ((f = fopen(CONFFILE, "r")) == NULL)
                fprintf(stderr, "can't find configuration file\\n"), exit(1);

If I try, the server happily replies with a nice 503 error:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

If I replace fopen with “open” or “fopen” (like I did in the instance above) it works fine. Now can someone please explain me what’s going on?

Update: Ok, so Eduardo explained it. It’s mod_security doing something it shouldn’t, and the error message is totally misleading. Case closed (that was fast!).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under en, paranoia, wtf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Bizarre Wordpress bug?”

  1. Eduardo Habkost says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 11:43 am

    It seems to be the useless f*cking mod_security. You will probably see it crying with fear on your error_log.

    I disable it on all my Dreamhost domains.

  2. Eduardo Habkost says:
    August 29th, 2007 at 11:44 am

    BTW, you disable it unmarking the “extra security” checkbox on the domain configuration page on the Dreamhost panel.

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