Stuck with ISPconfig error reading data from FastCGI server? We can help you!

ISPConfig is an Open Source Hosting Control Panel for Linux. Often our customers report to us that while trying to access site hosted with ISPConfig, they end up with a 500 internal server error

Here at Bobcares, we handle requests from our customers to fix similar issues as a part of our Server Management Services.

Today let’s see how our Support Engineers fix this for our customers.

How to fix ISPconfig error reading data from FastCGI server

Before going into the steps for fixing this error we will see what causes this error.

From the apache error_log we will be able to see the following:

Causes:

1. Incorrect file permissions
2. Compatibility issue with ISP config version
3. Issues with Opcache

 Steps to fix this error:

Following are the steps that our support engineers follow to fix this error for our customers:

1. Incorrect file permission

In a newly created web you find the following folders with the following permissions:

duffy:/hom/www/bob# ls-al
total 20
drwxrwxr-x        2  nobody bob   4096 Jul 21 21:06  cgi-bin
drwxr-xr-x        2  nobody bob   4096 Jul 21 21:06  log
drwxr-xr-x        2  nobody bob   4096 Jul 21 21:06  ssl
drwxr-xr-x        2  nobody bob   4096 Jul 21 21:06  user
drwxrwxr-x        3  nobody bob   4096 Jul 21 21:06  web

We will get a detailed explanation for each of these from the following:

cgi-bin: Here you can save Perl scripts that should be executed by the web server (if "CGI Scripts" is activated for the site).

log: This is the folder where the web server saves its log files for the site.

ssl: If this is an SSL web you can find the necessary SSL files here (e.g. SSL request, SSL certificate).

user: This is the folder where the home directories of the users belonging to the site are created. For the user "testuser" you can find the directory "testuser" under "user".

web: This folder is the Document Root for the site, i.e. this is the place to save the files/folders that should be accessible via internet.

If there is no administrator for the site, the folders belong to the user the Apache web server is running under by default (“nobody”); otherwise they belong to the administrator of the site “bob_admin”.

If the permission and ownership of the files are different from the one above, it may trigger the error. Thus we may need to correct that with the chown/chmod  commands.

2. Compatibility issue with ISP config version

At times the error can be fixed by updating the ISPconfig version. We can try running the ISPConfig installer again, as an upgrade and choose to reconfigure services.

This can be done using the following:

cd /tmp
wget http://www.ispconfig.org/downloads/ISPConfig-3-stable.tar.gz
tar xvfz ISPConfig-3-stable.tar.gz
cd ispconfig3_install/install
php -q update.php

3. Issues with Opcache

At times Prestashop users may face issue with a Prestashop site showing an internal server error while loading it. This is commonly seen after migrating from cPanel environment to ISPconfig.

In most of the cases we can fix this error by disabling opcache. We can add the following code in php.ini.

opcache.enable=0

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Conclusion

To conclude, we saw the steps that our Support Techs follow to fix this error for our customers.