Two days of hell…

So a couple of days ago I installed some caching and security plugins on the server that runs both this site and the film magazine I run called Rogue Cinema.  Rogue was just recently converted over to WordPress, and this site’s been running on it since the beginning.  Well after I installed the plugins on both sites, I started having problems with them.  Everything from forbidden messages to nothing more than a directory listing.  It wasn’t even anything that was reproducible, which made it even more frustrating.  Everything would run fine, and then boom, it would start doing it for no apparent reason.  A restart of the server software would get it working again for a while, but then later, it would start all over again.

I spent the last two days cleaning out the databases of all the old options, getting rid of file system locks, cleaning up .htaccess files and everything else I could think to do, but nothing seemed to work.  Finally I gave up and upgraded both the web server software and PHP to their current versions, which was a total pain because the Apache upgrade was a major revision, so I had to comb through all the config files making sure I had all the settings there that needed to be there, and I had to do that for PHP as well.

The long and the short of it is, after two days of massive frustration, I think I finally have it fixed now.  I’m crossing my fingers anyway, but it seems to be running ok.  Now I can finally get back to my writing.