Debugging Restore

I moved a server from a 5.9 CentOS server to a newer 6.4. The 5.9 server has been compromised which is a first time in my experience. I am moving the websites because I don't know how to fix the server at this point. One site has been hacked twice in the last month but when moved I just get a stupid 500 error.

(The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.)

I have move sites a couple hundred times. Once in a blue moon this happens. Now I went from a working Joomla website to a broken website. Looking for suggestions on how to find out why it is not working.

I know this is a very big general question and I am sorry about that. The mySQL and files are all there and all looks good. The questions is if the server restore does a faithful job, what could be a reason for the failure to get a working website? Three different sets of backup files have been tried, all with the same results.

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"Option FollowSymLinks not allowed here" - appears in the error logs. I commented it out and the site works.

Whew! OK, will know to watch for that in the future. Have to read up about it.

Howdy -- great, glad you got it working!

As an alternative to "FollowSymLinks", you can use "SymlinksIfOwnerMatch", which is safer.

The bad news though is that if they were breaking into your site, the vulnerability that allowed that may be included with the other files in your backup.

It doesn't catch everything, and sometimes the bad guys can hide stuff pretty well -- but I've had some luck using this tool to detect some malware:

http://www.rfxn.com/projects/linux-malware-detect/

It uses a special ClamAV database to search for web-based malware.