[gh-433] Using leading or trailing spaces when creating a page alias leads to an invalid .htaccess file.
Related to 7.21.2012 7:14 outage Admin deleted a URI from the Sites Alias Page https://unlcms.unl.edu/admin/sites/unl/aliases and .htaccess file was modified bringing all sites down.
Hosting.com did the following to remedy:
As we discussed, the downtime this morning was due to a recent change in the site's .htaccess file, which was modified at 7:32 AM (Dallas time):
========== $ ls -lh /var/www/unl.edu/htdocs/.htaccess -rw-rw-r-- 1 tsteiner2 unl 263K Jul 21 07:05 /var/www/unl.edu/htdocs/.htaccess
Specifically, there was an error in a RewriteCond value which resulted in all requests to the site generating the following error in Apache:
========== [Sat Jul 21 07:32:22 2012] [alert] [client 127.0.0.1] /var/www/unl.edu/htdocs/.htaccess: RewriteCond: bad flag delimiters
This led to the load balancer marking both web servers as down. The file contains many rules, and I was not able to determine immidiately which specific rule was causing the failure. As requested over the phone, I moved in place a recent copy of the .htaccess file I found under /var/www/unl.edu/htdocs-svn/.htaccess on the server (renaming the original .htaccess.bak first), and this was able to restore funtionality of the site. The modified time on this file is Jun 19th.
Hosting.com ref number T10564356 - https://customer.hosting.com/Support/ViewTicket.aspx?id=10564356