Well this is a geek only type of post, so Spanish students may want to skip it - but for the Joomla users who do come to the site to read some of the articles and mods I've posted in my downloads section, I thought it would be helpful to post about what caused today's outage.

The dynamic websites (PHP, MySQL)  were down for over 6 hours - after I used Cpanel to update my Apache install, as the recent PHP update did not include GD support.

I thought it would be a few clicks and a few minutes - as I had already updated Apache in this manner via Cpanel (WHM) before. What I didn't know, was that selecting to activate the suexec modules - would lead to a total shutdown of my PHP pages.

When trying to access these pages, I would get the dreaded Server Error 500: The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Upon examining the error logs in Cpanel for an individual site - I found this error: Premature end of script headers:

After trying to reinstall Apache with all sorts of modules selected and unselected, I finally found a website talking about how the suexec function can cause all kinds of trouble. When I rebuilt Apache with all of the suexec things unchecked - as well as renaming the 2 suexec files on my system  to suexecxx - the Apache restart finally produced actual PHP pages again instead of error messages.

Hope this info can help somebody so they aren't down for 6 hours with this same issue!