Hopefully someone can help shed some light on a problem that's cropped up today with my site. Earlier today out of the blue the site (Drupal 5.23) threw a 500 error at me. A call to hosting support indicated that it was due to a "premature end of header script" on index.php. Before I had a chance to really troubleshoot anything, support told me the site was back up and the problem was a bad php.ini file. Problem solved… or so I thought.
Drupal's logs show that a MySQL table has crashed, the ad_statistics table from the ad module. Attempts to disable the ad module in Drupal admin result in a 500 error. The 500 error goes away when the ad module files are removed from the modules directory. I manually removed the ad module tables from the database, but I'm still getting random "page not found" errors (for example, on admin/build/blocks) that according to support are the result of "premature end of header script" this time from /admin.
Any attempts to reinstall the ad module (5.1.7) result in another 500 error.
Any ideas on how I should proceed? I don't know if any of the preceding makes any sense, but it helped me to try to sort out what's going on…
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This just in…
After telling me that nothing was done on their end, my hosting company (WingSix) lets me know this morning that they installed some new security software on the server that is apparently is messing with Drupal and Apache and making the 500 errors happen.
I had been looking at the Advertisement module as a possible culprit, but now it appears to be a symptom, not a cause. Which makes sense when you think about it.
The moral of this story: Keep bugging your hosting company—it's probably something they did. ;)