Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

Wednesday, 15 December 2010 13:18 CST

user9757

Hello everybody,

Since I restored my site with Akeeba Backup Pro, there are some problems on the restored version.

First off all, All the pages are in error 404. That's why I checked this page.

I saw that in the configuration.php, the $live_site should be the live site URL... Ok, so this is actually my URL, but I didn't changed the DNS yet, because I would like to finalize my site on my new server before changing them... The reason is that I have a forum too, and it is still open for my community. So, if I change my DNS, the URL will be redirecting to my new server, but my community won't have access to the live forum...

So, I changed the $live_site value with the IP of my new server... Since then, I only have some timout message, in the frontend as the backend. I changed it again with my URL, but nothing changed, I have some timouts... Impossible to access my site now.

So, I cannot see how I can fix all these problems... First, the timeouts, and then, the 404 errors...

This is drive me crazy.

Any help would be really appreciated.

Thanks! :)

Edited by user9757 on 2010-12-15 13:19 CST

Wednesday, 15 December 2010 17:39 CST

nicholas

You were that close to answering your own question:

So, I changed the $live_site value with the IP of my new server... Since then, I only have some timout message, in the frontend as the backend. I changed it again with my URL, but nothing changed, I have some timeouts... Impossible to access my site now.

Your site is now under a temporary URL, like http://www.yourserver.com/~username. Now, you have three issues:
1. Your $live_site variable MUST be "http://www.yourserver.com/~username" (no trailing slash) for the SEF URLs to work. Of course, once the site goes live you have to switch it back to your regular domain name (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com) or the SEF URLs will break again.

2. The .htaccess file has a commented out RewriteBase line. This must be tweaked to read:

RewriteBase /~username

but when the site goes live you will have to tweak it AGAIN to read

RewriteBase /

for the SEF URLs to work properly.

3. On most servers SEF URLs do not work at all when using the temporary URL to access your site.

I advise you to revert any changes you made and take the site on-line.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 16 December 2010 06:58 CST

user9757

Thanks Nicholas for your answer.

Your site is now under a temporary URL, like http://www.yourserver.com/~username. Now, you have three issues:

1. Your $live_site variable MUST be "http://www.yourserver.com/~username" (no trailing slash) for the SEF URLs to work. Of course, once the site goes live you have to switch it back to your regular domain name (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com) or the SEF URLs will break again.

I placed this is my configuration.php (with real IP of course):

var $live_site = 'http://91.XXX.X.XX/~juj';

2. The .htaccess file has a commented out RewriteBase line. This must be tweaked to read:

RewriteBase /~username

That's what I made, but now, I have an Internal Server Error - 500

:(

Thanks for your help.

Edited by user9757 on 2010-12-16 06:59 CST

Friday, 17 December 2010 01:45 CST

nicholas

mod_rewrite (Apache's module which processes the .htaccess directives for SEF URLs) and temporary URLs do not mix. They just won't work together. Put your site live after clearing $live_site and commenting out the RewriteBase line.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 17 December 2010 17:19 CST

user9757

Ok, nothing seems to work.
So I'll close the forum of my community, and then change the DNS.

Thanks Nicholas.

Saturday, 18 December 2010 14:35 CST

nicholas

Yup, this is exactly my experience with temporary URLs. You can't get SEF URLs with them. I have also asked the chief network technician of a major host to take a look at it and he came to the conclusion that it's most likely due to something in Apache, albeit he didn't have enough time to investigate further. I have also replicated the same issue on a local server when I turned on the user-based URLs (a.k.a. "temporary URLs") and tried to access a test site with a URL like http://localhost/~nicholas. For the life of me, I couldn't get SEF URLs to work. So, the only way seems to proceed as you suggested: assigning a domain name.

One trick I found to be working is having "scrape" domain names (i.e. domain names I do not use on live sites) and assign them on sites before I take them live. This allows me to test the site setup. The trick is to use a short TTL (Time To Live) value in the DNS settings, about 30 minutes or so. I also set a short TTL to the intended domain name's DNS so that the switch can occur very fast when I am through. After I am done checking the site, I assign the intended domain name and wait for DNS propagation to occur. Then I reset the TTL to a more sane value (something in the 1-3 days range).

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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