tfrederick

I know that help has been offered with the install. I am not pointing any fingers, believe me. I ran into many problems that I think were just related to my own unique set up that I was unable to get help getting around, or could not figure out myself. These are my shortcomings. That said, I have done a complete removal, and I am willing to try again. I’ll contact you and thanks for the help.

I have been trading e-mail with my web hosting support all morning, trying to get to the bottom of this. In short, updating my .htaccess file causes all pages to return Error 403 Forbidden Screens. I was told that certain .htaccess functions are not supported. When asked which functions, I was provided the following list. I’m not savvy enough to know what they mean. Can any of these be the cause of my problems?

The following PHP functions cannot be used:

fsockopen
passthru
proc_close
proc_get_status
proc_nice
proc_open
proc_terminate
pclose
set_ini
popen
system
shell_exec
exec

* PHP Value is not allowed in .htaccess files

Macmanx – My empty .htaccess file was updated when I set the permalinks. The problem is that as a result of that, ALL pages from the dashboard, including the main page https://x.babygotbooks.com are 403 forbidden. It appears that my server is locking me out for updating the .htaccess file.

My .htaccess is in the same directory as the WordPress index.php file. Which presented mod-rewrite code do you mean? Sorry if I am slow on the uptake.

Warning: Lengthy Post

Well that went nowhere. Here was the first reply from myhosting.com:

<For our Linux accounts we support the use of .htaccess files but for
security reasons we do limit its use and only allow the following
functionality. Below are some of the most common reasons and methods of
using the .htaccess file.

Password protection

Password Protection allows you to have a folder or specific file
password protected, this means when someone tries to browse to that
folder or file a box will come up requesting they fill in a username and
password.

To achieve this password protection you will be actually using two
files, one is the .htaccess file and the other is the .htpassword. Lets
say I want to create a user “bob” with the password “smith” and protect
the following folder “x.mydomain.com/secret” Below is what I would put
in the files:

FILE: .htaccess

AuthUserFile
/var/www/domains/x.mydomain.com/docs/secret/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName ‘Secured Directory’
require valid-user

FILE: .htpassword

bob:Wr9K63jF9u5S2

You can make these files using any text editor your choose (notepad for
example) and then upload the to the /docs/secret folder on your Linux
account. If your looking at this you’re likely thinking to yourself:
where did you get the “Wr9K63jF9u5S2” from. Well that is the Linux
encrypted version of the word “secret”. To generate this encrypted
version you can just visit the link below and put in the username and
password you want and it will generate the line you need to input.

https://cmpt165.cs.sfu.ca/docs/htpasswd-create&gt;

So I asked for clarification. Where would I add this text in the file, etc. Here was the lengthy reply:

<You would have to contact WordPress to find out what folder they want
what file in. >

If anyone can help me sort out this mess I would be greatly appreciative.

It seems that my web host, myhosting.com – who feature a nice WordPress logo on their main page, don’t allow me to access the .htacess file for security reasons. I have to setup a seperate password file apparently. That would have been nice to know before spending days on end trying everything else. I am seeking clarification and will post the happy conclusion.

Yes it does, Tom. But It comes back when the .htacess file is reinserted and is written to. So there is some connection.

OK, my .htaccess file is in the right place. It has a file size of 0. I changed the attributes to 766. Just to make sure that everything was reset, I did a ctrl+f5 hard refresh, and went to the dashboard to attempt resetting my permalinks. I hit the “update permaling structure” button, and now I get a 403 forbidden error on any page that I try to access. WTF?

Yes it is. I got that part correct.

Ok, let me come at this another way. I have been reading as much as I can on the boards and tutorials. I have used chmod to change attributes of the .htaccess file to 777. I am getting 403 Forbidden errors now. I don’t what’s going on. Is my .htaccess file in the correct place? I have uploaded it into the main director, below the folders for WP-Admin, WP-Content, etc.

It does. I just downloaded the .htaccess file. The file was empty. I copied all of the text from the permalink box. Saved the file. Uploaded it by ftp to the same location, chose to overwrite the old .htaccess file. Now I get a 403 Error – forbidden You don’t have permission to access /wp-admin/options-permalink.php on this server. So I am going to go back in and take the text out and I’ll be back at square one.

I put it in the same directory as the index.php file. I deleted all of the text that I had placed in there before. I hard refreshed for good luck, and I am still unable to write to my .htaccess file. The line at the top of the page says “You should update your .htaccess now.”

I am getting teh problem that says that I can’t write to the .htaccess file. I read in earlier post on this problem, mine, that my .htaccess file shoudl have a section that begins “# BEGIN WordPress” or I won’t be able to write to the file. Any idea what that is about?

Thanks. Did the control+f5. I still have the same problem. I copied the text from the permalinks box that should be in my .htaccess file and copied in manually. Saved it. Hard refreshed again. I still have the same problem.

Not sure how to hard refresh. I have cleared all cookies. I checked the CHMOD in FileZilla, and that’s ok – 666.

OK that worked. I have an .htaccess file now. However, I got a message at the top that says that I should update my .htacess file, and a note at the bottom says “if my file was writable….” so I followed the link, did the chmod so that it is writable, and I still have the error. What now?