Web Application Firewall is disabled Type: WAF Status

Thanks for reaching out!

Just so I understand, you see that message where exactly? When you look at the Wordfence > Firewall > All Firewall Options page on your site, in the Basic Firewall Option section what does it say there? Disabled, Learning Mode, or Enabled and Protecting? And do you see any other Firewall errors at the top of the page?

Thanks!
Mia

Hello, The message I shared is the description from a scan result listed as “Critical”. The details from this error in the scan read as “Wordfence’s Web Application Firewall has been unexpectedly disabled. If you see a notice at the top of the Wordfence admin pages that says “The Wordfence Web Application Firewall cannot run,” click the link in that message to rebuild the configuration. If this does not work, you may need to fix file permissions.”

When I go to Wordfence > Firewall > All Firewall Options, it shows the following message at the top of the page (which has no links in it): “The WAF storage engine is currently set to mysqli, but Wordfence is unable to use the database. The WAF will fall back to using local file system storage instead.”

In the Basic Firewall options it is currently showing as “Enabled and Protecting”.

Please let me know if you need anything else. Thank you!

Can you share who your hosting provider is? Also can you send a diagnostics report to wftest [at] wordfence [dot] com? make sure and add your forum username (@bcs213) where indicated. Please respond here when you have sent it.

Thanks!

Mia

• This reply was modified 1 year, 9 months ago by WFSupport.

Hello, I have sent the diagnostic report. The host is WP Engine. I have several sites on this host without this issue, but I have several other sites on the same host account that are getting this same issue in the scan results. Thank you!

Can you take a look at the wp-config.php file and tell me if you see values that look to be valid usernames/passwords, or are they constants such as ‘db_password’, ‘db_username’, etc?

Hello, I checked the wp-config.php file. For the database configuration, it shows the actual username / password.

I can’t remember if you mentioned this before, but was this site migrated to WPE?

Can you try adding these to the wordfence-waf.php file the values listed here (make sure and edit them to match your information)?
https://www.wordfence.com/help/firewall/mysqli-storage-engine/#optional-mysqli-storage-engine-constants

Let me know if those help.

Mia

• This reply was modified 1 year, 8 months ago by WFSupport.

Yes, I did migrate to WPE. Should I still try these changes you mentioned if I am on WPE?

I tried what the article mention anyway while the site is hosted on WP Engine, and it did not fix anything.

Hello, are there any updates on this?

Is there anything that can be done to fix this?

Hello, @bcs213

Thanks for your patience here.

I see initially you mentioned a reinstallation did not work. Can you confirm if you’ve only tried a reinstall on one site? It sounds like you did completely wipe the tables in that case, however, I want to confirm and go over a few of the initial steps again.

Please try the following. First, on one of the sites having the issue, try deactivating the plugin and using the top option to “Keep all Wordfence tables and data” and then complete the deactivation. From there, reactivate the plugin and let me know if the issue persists.

If it does, try deactivating and clearing the tables again, using the bottom option in the prompt “Delete all Wordfence tables and data“. After that, let me know if the issue still persists. With WPEngine, that should fix the issue. If the issue does continue, please send over the diagnostics from that same site to [email protected] (via Wordfence > Tools > Diagnostics > Send Report by Mail) with your forum username in the 2nd field there. Let me know here when those are sent and I’ll check that over with the QA team at that point.

Thanks,
Scott