Hi everyone,

Sorry for the newbie question but I'm having a sudden problem with the migration of my Drupal 7 site from shared hosting to the Linode VPS.

I followed the great documentation and all seemed to be going well: I set up my Linode with Ubuntu 12 and LAMP, and moved my database and Drupal files onto my new server. I was able to view my website (as an anonymous user) and access the phpmyadmin by inserting the server IP into my Safari browser. [I haven't been able to move my domain name from my shared hosting (anhosting.com) yet as it's the weekend and nobody can help cancel or move my domain.]

My first issue came up when I found that I was not able to log into my Drupal 7 site as an admin user, and some searching indicated that it might have something to do with enabling mod-rewrite. So I did that via terminal and restarted apache2.

Now, I cannot type in my host name or ip address in the browser bar as it is re-routed to a dnslooking/search engine results page, (i.e., http://www.dnsrsearch.com/index.php?ori ... %3A//www.###.##.##.###/&r=) where the # is my vps ip (or my hostname, as appearing in the /etc/hosts file).

So I've now disabled mod rewrite thinking that was the problem and I'm still no longer able to view my website. Even when I click on the pages that formerly worked in my history (including phpmyadmin) I'm again brought back to that search engine redirect.

As this is my first setup, I'm sure I've done something wrong but if there is anybody who could at least tell me what I could specifically google for help I'd appreciate it very much!

Thanks,
Meadowlarque

Meadowlarque,
That page is from your internet service provider (Time Warner Cable). It is very common for an ISP to serve up ads when you type in an invalid domain name, url, etc (or something gets redirected to an invalid URL).

Your problem may have been caused mod_rewrite depending on what changes you made. It looks like your Mac and Safari are serving up cached pages for you (that's probably why you're still seeing the dnsrsearch.com page).
- Have you tried your IP address in a different browser?
- Have you cleared the cache is Safari?
- Have you tried your IP address on another device (computer, tablet, smartphone, etc)?

As far as your mod_rewrite you'd have to post the code you were trying to use when this started happening (be sure to use the 'code' tags when posting the code so we can read it as nature intended).


MSJ

Great, that redirect does go away when I try it with Google Chrome - thanks!

So, my question now, if anyone can help, is related to mod rewrite...

This is what I used to enable mod_rewrite via terminal:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Is there another approach I should have taken to debug this problem (not being able to log in to Drupal)?

Thanks again,
Meadowlarque

meadowlarque,
We'd need to see the mod_rewrite code in your .htaccess file. That's where the action happens


MSJ

Thanks for your help - as an update, I did a whole new round of googling and reading and this is what helped me enable mod rewrite for Drupal, for anyone else with this problem. By default, my site was set up to ignore the .htaccess so I had to enable the override the apache configuration files.

To do so, I had to nano edit the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default to make sure the Directory setting in my root folder says "AllowOverride ALL"

For better quality information/examples, these links helped me the most:
http://www.setsailmedia.com/2012/11/07/how-to-tech-support/apache2s-htaccess-and-linodes-linux-virtual-server/
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8628907/how-to-activate-mod-rewrite