Fixing the infamous White Screen of Death on Site Migration
Posted: Fri Dec 19, 2008 9:48 pm
So, for long and uninteresting reasons, I needed to move a working CMSMS site from a PHP 4 host to a WAMP-based PHP 5 host.
I've done similar migrations at least fifty times, without problems.
Today, with too little coffee in my bloodstream, I made a few omissions, and ran into problems. Partially due to under-caffeination, I found these problems very difficult to diagnose, so I thought I'd post this to help anyone in the same boat.
I got the dreaded White Screen of Death. Nothing useful in the PHP logs (even though I had errors set to E_ALL | E_NOTICE).
There ended up being two problems:
* Database permissions. I didn't correctly grant the user access permissions on the new database.
* Directory permissions. I had given correct directory permissions on CMS_ROOT/tmp/cache and CMS_ROOT/tmp/templates_c, but had failed to give the correct permissions on the contentcache.php
The combination of the problems apparently prevented any useful diagnostic messages.
So, the moral of the story:
even if you know exactly what you're doing, it pays to follow the proper steps one by one, and make sure you're not skipping any.
Good Luck,
___Samuel___
I've done similar migrations at least fifty times, without problems.
Today, with too little coffee in my bloodstream, I made a few omissions, and ran into problems. Partially due to under-caffeination, I found these problems very difficult to diagnose, so I thought I'd post this to help anyone in the same boat.
I got the dreaded White Screen of Death. Nothing useful in the PHP logs (even though I had errors set to E_ALL | E_NOTICE).
There ended up being two problems:
* Database permissions. I didn't correctly grant the user access permissions on the new database.
* Directory permissions. I had given correct directory permissions on CMS_ROOT/tmp/cache and CMS_ROOT/tmp/templates_c, but had failed to give the correct permissions on the contentcache.php
The combination of the problems apparently prevented any useful diagnostic messages.
So, the moral of the story:
even if you know exactly what you're doing, it pays to follow the proper steps one by one, and make sure you're not skipping any.
Good Luck,
___Samuel___