CMS Made Simple Forums

I often get errors in Admin after submitting some data - a 403 at first because I have indexing disabled, but if I enable directory indexing I get a 404.

Mostly this relates to using modules, and the URL in admin is "http://mydomain.com/admin/moduleinterface.php"
I know this isn't the modules board, but my question is really about debugging. Is there a way to find out more about what is causing these errors? I have tried turning debug on in config but that doesn't give me any information on the 403/404 screen. There are no errors in my PHP logs.

I have had these errors in many modules (FormBuilder, CGblog, Glossary) so I think it must be some general configuration error, maybe to do with my hosting? Mostly the errors happen after submitting content containing HTML tags - it tolerates a simple structure but nested structures cause the errors, so maybe some kind of parsing issue? I know this description is very vague.

I saw another post where it was suggested that having mod_security installed in Apache can cause problems. Do you think that could be it?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

If you think it has to do with your server you need to post your system config, which is a good idea especially in cases like this...

System info:

Cms Version: 1.10.3

Installed Modules:

CMSMailer: 2.0.2
CMSPrinting: 1.0
FileManager: 1.2.0
MenuManager: 1.7.7
MicroTiny: 1.1.1
ModuleManager: 1.5.3
News: 2.12.3
Search: 1.7
ThemeManager: 1.1.4
TinyMCE: 2.9.5
AdvancedContent: 0.9.2
GBFilePicker: 1.3.1
CGSimpleSmarty: 1.4.10
FormBuilder: 0.7.1
TemplateExternalizer: 2.0.6
CGExtensions: 1.27.7
Gallery: 1.5.3


Config Information:

php_memory_limit:
process_whole_template: false
output_compression: false
max_upload_size: 350000000
default_upload_permission: 664
url_rewriting: mod_rewrite
page_extension: /
query_var: page
image_manipulation_prog: GD
auto_alias_content: true
locale:
default_encoding: utf-8
admin_encoding: utf-8
set_names: true


Php Information:

phpversion: 5.2.17
md5_function: On (True)
gd_version: 2
tempnam_function: On (True)
magic_quotes_runtime: Off (False)
E_STRICT: 0
memory_limit: 256M
max_execution_time: 60
output_buffering: On
safe_mode: Off (False)
file_uploads: On (True)
post_max_size: 15M
upload_max_filesize: 350M
session_save_path: /tmp (1777)
session_use_cookies: On (True)
xml_function: On (True)


Server Information:

Server Api: cgi-fcgi
Server Db Type: MySQL (mysql)
Server Db Version: 5.5.22


Also, my host has a few PHP functions disabled: symlink, shell_exec, exec, proc_close, proc_open, popen, system, dl, passthru, escapeshellarg, escapeshellcmd
If any of these are specifically needed I can get them enabled, but they wont enable all of them "just in case" because they are concerned about security (it's shared hosting).

For anyone else having similar problems:

The 403/404 errors were caused by having mod_security installed on my hosting server. I asked the hosting company to disable mod_security on my accounts and all errors disappeared. What a relief!