Hi, our installation has been working well for some time. Suddenly we have discovered that we can't get to the admin login. This is the error we are getting:

---

Internal Server Error

CHttpRequest is unable to determine the path info of the request.

An internal error occurred while the Web server was processing your request. Please contact the webmaster to report this problem.

---

I'm not sure where to start looking with this error. We have logged in only 2 days ago and there hasn't been any changes since then so I'm not sure what's happening. I hope someone can shed some light on this. Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Cheers,
Karen

Additional information:

We've found that removing the .htaccess file that contains the redirects for https, enable us to access the admin login page. We are using this as a workaround for now so we can continue with our active survey. However, we will need to figure out why it is suddenly not working with the redirect. Anyone has any clues?

It is highly unlikely that an installation that worked fine 2 days ago, stops working with ANY changes applied.

My guess would be that there have been updates on your server. Check with the person responsible for the server you are hosting at and see if there have been made any updates / changes to the server (e.g. new PHP version, etc.).

I don't see any logic explanation for a web app that worked perfectly fine to stop working without any changes made to itself or to its environment (server).

Thanks for your response. That was exactly what I thought too except that I couldn't tell where to start looking. When I checked with the hosting provider, they said to check with the developer but there hasn't been any updates to Limesurvey that has been applied so I didn't think that was the case.

I was hoping that someone would recognise the error message and know where to start looking. In any case, it looks like we've narrowed down to the auto SSL in .htaccess. If we remove .htaccess, we can now access the admin login. This is the workaround we are using now so we can at least continue working with Limesurvey. However, we need to find a long term solution.

On checking the SSL cert, it seems that it may have been updated/renewed on 6 October 2018. It does look like that is the issue. But how do we check and how to solve this? We are using AutoSSL on cPanel.

karencheah wrote: it looks like we've narrowed down to the auto SSL in .htaccess. If we remove .htaccess, we can now access the admin login.

What connection do you see between .htaccess and AutoSSL (cPanel automatically installing SSLcerts by Comodo or Let's Encrypt)?

The .well-known/ folder was sometimes blocked by .htaccess rules, but is now overridden by webserver redirects.

Depending on how you install LimeSurvey you might have modified .htaccess shipped with LimeSurvey via some settings in cPanel. You might compare the .htaccess files.
I recommend to install LimeSurvey into a folder instead into root folder.

There are no autossl on default .htaccess : github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/.htaccess

Maybe you need (or not) github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/b4...13f296/.htaccess#L20

DenisChenu wrote: There are no autossl on default .htaccess : github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/.htaccess

AutoSSL is a set of tools by cPanel. Modifications of htaccess are done on Apache config level (to ensure .well-known is accessible for verification of ownership of a domain to generate ssl cert issued by a CA (Comodo,Let'sEncrypt).

But the issue decribed by the threadstarter looks not connected to AutoSSL.

The first step would be comparing the original htaccess and the htaccess currently in place.

Or move/install LimeSurvey in a folder under root. Which minimize impact of different applications changing htaccess in the webroot.

jelo wrote:

DenisChenu wrote: There are no autossl on default .htaccess : github.com/LimeSurvey/LimeSurvey/blob/master/.htaccess

AutoSSL is a set of tools by cPanel. Modifications of htaccess are done on Apache config level (to ensure .well-known is accessible for verification of ownership of a domain to generate ssl cert issued by a CA (Comodo,Let'sEncrypt).
…

It's really a bad solution to set it on htaccess when we can set it in virual host.

I always surprise by cpanel …

DenisChenu wrote: …

It's really a bad solution to set it on htaccess when we can set it in virual host.[/quote]cPanel is doing it on the virtual host level. cPanel AutoSSL isn't directly causing the login issue. There is no systematic issue with LimeSurvey under cPanel.

cPanel is offering way more options out of the box. But knowing and understanding these options are a different thing. And only provider can access them.

Use a Global DCV Passthrough instead of .htaccess modification (requires EA4)
When you enable this option, Apache adds global rewrite rules to the webserver configuration so that the system does not process additional rewrite rules for DCV filenames. These global rules make it unnecessary for cPanel & WHM to modify each virtual host’s .htaccess file. Note: When you enable this option, the system receives a trivial performance penalty because all of the HTTP requests must be matched against the DCV filename regular expressions.

Something seems to be wrong with the htaccess file. We don't know the content. We don't know the version of LimeSurvey. We know a bit more than nothing.

jelo wrote: …

Something seems to be wrong with the htaccess file. We don't know the content. We don't know the version of LimeSurvey. We know a bit more than nothing.

You're absolutely right …

There is no systematic issue with LimeSurvey under cPanel.

I can confirm that. Running Limesurvey on a VPS with Cpanel and no such problems.

Hi all, I will try to answer as many of the questions as possible as I would like to find a solution.

There is not a direct connection between AutoSSL and the .htaccess. I was advised by the hosting provider that if .htaccess was removed, then the error did not appear anymore when accessing the admin login. The .htaccess was basically created automatically by cPanel when setting up the redirect to https. The result of that has entries in .htaccess with reference to cpanel as well as Comodo. There are no other manual entries in the file. There was also no original .htaccess.

AutoSSL is still on now but you can go to non-secure site as well because redirects not there anymore. So it isn't really related to AutoSSL but the cPanel redirect. Just that the hosting support mentioned AutoSSL renewal will need the .htaccess to be in place but that's another story, I suppose.

Limesurvey is already in a folder under root.

Limesurvey version is 2.72.3+171020

I apologise that I didn't give all the necessary info to start with but I was hoping the error message would point to something. Like I said, I'm really not sure where to look and appreciate any advice given.