ArchAngl

Ok. So I think I figured out what was going on MAYBE.

I was in such a tizzy this morning over my “hosts” (given their names I wonder if they’ve ever heard of pashtunwali – not much in the way of “hosts” considering their “we don’t care if cleantalk.org shows 70+ spam entries for that ip in the last 2 hours, it’s not on Spamhaus so we’re not filtering it!) refusal to assist me in hardening my WP site that I went looking for solutions in addition to All In One WP Security & Firewall.

In my haste, I stumbled across perishable press and all their script and .htaccess modifications and didn’t notice that a part of the firewall in the plugin was in fact their “5G” script… so I added it myself to the already modified (by AIO) .htaccess file.

SOMEHOW, do not ask me how, this created a recursive CRON job that loaded on every page hit. The CRON joh which 500’d was called up from my WordPress installation (the ip tracked to my shared host) and then somehow my computer (IP of origin) responded with an immediate call to wp-admin/admin-ajax.php.

Do NOT ask me how or why, I do not know. I am only describing the symptoms so that the developers can perhaps gain insight from my mistake.

THE END RESULT HOWEVER IS – my theme’s custom 404 page is not loading and I have no idea why. Tomorrow I will go about deactivating and reloading it to see if it’s restored. If not I will post and perhaps someone can assist me.

In any case, copypasta of 5G’s robots, ip, and firewall list to .htaccess is a HUGE mistake. I blame myself, but to be honest I’d like a TON more documentation on this plugin. I like to read before I screw around and I’m the print it on paper with a highlighter in hand “old school” sort of woman.

As of now I have not seen the mystery CRON 500 job calls for 30 minutes… al-Hamdu lillah! It does seem that if I leave the site and return that WordPress calls up a CRON job automatically when I hit the page – I read something about that in the tech docs and think it is normal. Now however, the status code is a straightforward 200.

Time for bed.

Thanks to all for the advice. Ir’s been a trying day to say the least.

I hate to ask the obvious question (so many sites too many opinions), but if anyone knows of a VERY good, VERY patient, shared host out there please let me know. The folks I’m trying out are proving NOT to be what they said they were. Two days to respond to a support ticket is insane.

For responses to that last question please do not clutter up the support thread. I can be reached at

[ email redacted, support is not offered that way ]

Thanks for the help.

Oh, and invariably the call to these unknownn CRON jobs are followed immediately by a call to:

https://softwaretestingsite.net/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

even if I didn’t hit a thing / reload a page / do ANYTHING.

The CRON job originates from my host ip… the ajax call from my computer.

Also getting this in wp-security-log.txt

FAILURE : Error inserting record into sec9432_aiowps_login_activity

which is new…

I haven’t a clue about what’s going on. My host says it’s definitely not them, but a 500 error is so vague as to be useless in terms of tracking a cause.

The CRON errors all look like this:

https://softwaretestingsite.net/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron=1390005374.2286438941955566406250

I thought perhaps it was checking (since it’s on the minute) to see if anyone had been logged in over allowed time, so I unclicked that option and it didn’t stop.

I thought it perhaps was file backups… clicked to stop those… no joy.

I’m out of answers.

No, I don’t. I’ve also got another problem today (perhaps it was me messing with .htaccess because that’s the only thing I’ve tried to work on today).

Anyway, the new problem is a Cron job running every minute and producing a “500” error.

I wasn’t getting these errors yesterday, though I have no idea what would generate the CRON job since I didn’t see them like I am today.

The login page feature is not activated.

Any idea what I might have done to trigger a CRON job that is unsuccessful?

Thanks for trying to help.

I would very much like to see the scans logged. I ran mine then left the page to go see what the heck was up… sadly I didn’t do it in a new tab, so when I came back the results were gone.

Basically it’s a one shot deal. There are no change logs. The comparison is made between the last time you ran it and the present moment.

Logs would be a great addition.