GNet Solutions » GNU/Linux Administration

I encountered an error while trying to access one of the web services provided. I recently did an upgrade of the servers, so I suspect that caused the problems. First, I checked to see if the error was affecting any other web sites, to find that all the web sites had been returning error 500; a server side error. So I checked the log file for the web site to see the following error:

tail /var/www/path/to/web/logfile

[Mon Feb 10 07:12:12 2014] [warn] [client 192.168.0.80] (104)Connection reset by peer: mod_fcgid: error reading data from FastCGI server
[Mon Feb 10 07:12:12 2014] [error] [client 192.168.0.80] Premature end of script headers: index.php

I then checked the apache log file, to see it had an error:

tail /var/log/apache2/error.log

[2014-02-10 07:17:06]: uid: (1002/user1) gid: (1003/group1) cmd: .php-fcgi-starter
[2014-02-10 07:17:06]: file is writable by others: (/var/www/php-fcgi-scripts/user1/.php-fcgi-starter)

I then checked the permissions of the FastCGI starter script

ls -la /var/www/php-fcgi-scripts/user1/.php-fcgi-starter

rw-rw-r- 1 user1 group1 890 Feb 7 17:08 .php-fcgi-starter

Fix this by removing the group writeable permission from the FCGI starter script:

chmod g-w /var/www/php-fcgi-scripts/user1/.php-fcgi-starter

I tested to see if the web site came back, only to get another error 500. I checked the apache2 logfile again to see a different error:

tail /var/log/apache2/error.log

[2014-02-10 07:27:21]: uid: (1002/user1) gid: (1003/group1) cmd: .php-fcgi-starter
[2014-02-10 07:27:21]: file has no execute permission: (/var/www/php-fcgi-scripts/user1/.php-fcgi-starter)

Fix this by adding user execution permissions to the FastCGI script:

chmod 740 /var/www/php-fcgi-scripts/user1/.php-fcgi-starter

This fixed the problem.