Supermassive Black Hole A Star

Author notes

Ep. 36, Page 53

smbhax

on April 4, 2019

The entire smbhax.com domain was down for 20 minutes or so this morning; fortunately I was tidying up some news archive scripts at the time so I ran into the "500 Internal Server Error" message in my web browser right away; usually that error message means I made a typo in my Perl script editing, but no typo I could make could cause that error to happen to every single page in the domain!

I gave my web host's tech support a jingle and they were able to find the problem pretty quick: what they supposed was a routine update to their Apache web server software seemed to have taken a dislike to an old PHP workaround I'd put in place for the phpBB forum I used to host for A* (specifically, it was "php_flag allow_url_fopen on" in .htaccess files : P—I think my version of phpBB needed that in order for users to be able to upload images or something); I no longer host the forum—or any other PHP scripts on the site whatsoever as far as I can recall…—so I just removed the old PHP scraps, and the site magically worked again. Yay! : P