[phpslash-users] Nasty "bug"

[Lars <la...@kv...>]

Hey, all!

I just went through something that seemed particularly nasty to me, and it 
caused my site to go down for almost 24 hours. The fault looked like it was 
caused by a dead httpd, but when I tried to reconstruct my site on a fresh 
install I found the culprit - my rss feed, which I display on my own site 
(only for logged in root users) made all pages with blocks on them 
inaccessible to *all* users. This, however, was not apparent until I found 
the problem.

The following error in the logs (Error in source file:rdfparser::parse_file 
could not open http://www.pda-nytt.no/backend.php3?d=0 ) lead me in the 
right direction. For some reason it's all over my logs, so it cannot be a 
"new" problem.

This leads me to the following questions:
1. How can a problem like this be allowed to crash a whole site ?
2. Why are blocks rendered even for users who shouldn't see them ? Isn't 
this a security breach and/or too resource intensive ?

It was only last night (after the crash) backend.php (I rewrite the url's 
so php3 -> php) stopped giving output, and this error seems to have 
occurred plenty before then.

If one of the developers wants the db dump from my site I'd be more than 
happy to give it out (I'll change my pwd's, though;o)

Cheers,

Lars