Today I ran into some problems with my server. I was getting an error in phpMyAdmin “Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly.” I thought maybe it was a side effect of working with sessions earlier this week. After some futile troubleshooting I messaged dream host about the problem. They responded fairly quickly saying that there was a problem with the server and the issue was resolved. Immediately after, my website was redirecting me to some resume website that appeared to belong to some web developer, who I thought was the culprit behind this atrocity. I went on a live chat to complain to a dream host support representative. I told them that my site was hacked! They responded that I would need to submit a ticket which I did which was forwarded to the security team that never got back to me. I took matters into my own hands and researched how to un-hack my site. I logged in to the shell and checked IP addresses of the last two months logins, and I tried I replacing index files, and yet it was still redirecting me to this obnoxious site, which was surprisingly not badly designed for a hacker. I decided to do some research on the URL that it was redirecting me to. I found a site that listed the domain servers for the domain name that I kept getting redirected to. It was a dream host domain server. I went and checked the domain server for my site and guess what? It was the same domain server! This led me to believe that it was a problem on the server. I messaged dream host online chat again this time not claiming that my site was hacked, but telling them about the new problem after the PHPMyAdmin issue was fixed. The representative told me that there was a problem on Apache earlier that was fixed and that I needed to clear my browser cache. That fixed the problem. What a relief.
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08.05.2011