This word confuses drupal

Posted by mike211175 on April 26, 2007 at 2:20am

I run a site that uses drupal (www.legaltree.ca)

I was stuggling to post a particular piece of text and eventually found that the problem was that the text contained the word: improperly .

I obtained a "page not found error". I could hardly believe it, but when i tried posting things on other parts of the site, I got the same result

Has anyone else had this error message from this or other words.

Please don't experiment on my site, and if you simply must, post your comment deep on the site, and then delete it immediately thereafter!

Regards
Michael

Comments

Lemme guess

Posted by styro on April 26, 2007 at 2:41am

I haven't looked, but I'd guess that your server has mod_security installed on it and that the word 'improperly' has the word 'perl' within it.

Generally, Drupal breaking due to specific words is 99 times out of 100 due to mod_security being installed on the server and a subset of the word being some unix command or SQL looking string etc.

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Oh yeah I forgot to mention that

Posted by styro on April 26, 2007 at 2:43am

fixing it would require your host or sysadmin reconfiguring or disabling mod_security.

mod_security is a very blunt instrument that causes a lot of collateral damage with false positives.

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Log

Posted by drupal-id.com on April 26, 2007 at 2:53am

Also, take a look at your mod_security log to find out more accurate informations.

does anyone have a list of "danger words"

Posted by mike211175 on April 26, 2007 at 3:53am

Thanks for that feedback - very interesting

I must admit, although not a newbie in time, I am in knowlege - having no formal computer training, I just fumble through it as I go

Soooo..I don't know what a mod_security log is - but it sounds like a log that only my host would be able to look at. However, I checked my drupal administration log and this is the error that is produced when I try to post a page with that "danger word"

403.shtml not found.

The problem with using a different word is that I am often posting articles produced by other people who may not want words changed.

Also, I am on a shared server and I am not sure my host would want to turn the mod_security off for me because it must have some value if they have it on in the first place, although I appreciate the comments about it being a blunt tool.

However, I was wondering if anyone has a list of "danger words" such that I could write a Word macro that searches documents for them and highlights them in red before I attempt to post those articles? This would save me lots of trial and error iterations in trying to identify which word is causing the problem.

Thanks again for your feedback.
Michael

rule lists etc

Posted by styro on April 26, 2007 at 4:16am

I have never used mod_security, so I know very little about it.

You should be able to download the default rules from their website, but you won't know how much your host has customised them anyway.

I assume that the 403 error page you get isn't a Drupal one, but rather an Apache one? That is always a good indication of which software is causing the problem. ie (in nearly all cases) if you get a Drupal themed error page the problem lies with Drupal config, and if you get an Apache error page the problem lies with Apache config.

Talk to your host anyway, stopping people posting valid english words is going too far IMO - they might be happy enough with Drupals built in defences against XSS and SQL injection attacks that they'll turn off lower mod_security for you or at least lower its thresholds.

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=-=

Posted by VM on April 26, 2007 at 4:20am

there is no master list that I am aware of (just googled for one for you). It seems your host would have configured the rules (list) in mod_security and thus this "list" would have to be given to you by them. see: http://www.modsecurity.org/projects/rules/

thanks for the advice, I will ask my host

Posted by mike211175 on April 26, 2007 at 5:09am

Armed with what you guys have told me, I will contact my host....after I attempt the daunting upgrade to Drupal 5.1 this weekend.

If it is of interest to anyone, the error message is showing on a drupal themed page, which according to the one post above suggests that it is a drupal error, although the other parts of the post above suggest that it was an apache error.

Anyway, thanks again for all your help, and I will contact my host.

Michael

=-=

Posted by VM on April 26, 2007 at 5:16am

drupal just handed you a 404 error because of the way .htaccess is set to catch them? or you could have a custom error page set in Drupal.

You may have accesss to your apache error logs to be able to see the error apache may have been thowing, not all shared hosts stop you from having access to apache logs. You may have access either through your hosts admin panel or through your FTP in a directory at the same level as your public root.

Interesting, I will search

Posted by mike211175 on April 26, 2007 at 5:45am

Interesting, I will search for those other logs you mention

thanks again

Improper substitution.

Posted by zeta ζ on April 26, 2007 at 4:28am

How about using improperIy, improperIy or improper1y?
Sorry not exactly a generic solution depends on the font.
Maybe an HTML entity like improp&#101;rly – improperly

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That is Sooo wierd

Posted by dman on April 26, 2007 at 4:33am

Must have been annoying going through the debug process to find that though!
It would make me want to hit something.

Anyway, to test more, is it a fraction of the word? Is it true that just a mention of 'perl' is enough to kill it?
That is so wrong :-}

.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/

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yip, just "perl" is enough

Posted by mike211175 on April 26, 2007 at 4:59am

I just tried making a post with just "perl" in it and got the "page not found" error, so styro was spot on with his first comment

I had that happen

Posted by Michelle on April 26, 2007 at 3:02am

That happened to me a looong time ago and I never did figure out the problem. I finally ended up just finding a different word. The comments on this thread are interesting. I wonder if that's what the problem was for me as well?

Michelle

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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

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_{Shell Multimedia - My sporadically updated mostly Drupal blog.}

=-=

Posted by VM on April 26, 2007 at 4:30am

highly likely if it was a single word that produced a page not found error.

It was

Posted by Michelle on April 26, 2007 at 4:45am

I forgot the word now, but it was a word that didn't have anything obvious about it. I figured it out by trying to paste in bits of my post at time and finally narrowed it down. At that point I had no clue why the word would be a problem but had spent so much time finding it I just changed the word and went on with life. LOL

Michelle

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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com

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_{Shell Multimedia - My sporadically updated mostly Drupal blog.}

I had a similar mysterious

Posted by CosmicVoyager on April 26, 2007 at 4:42am

I had a similar mysterious problem a few weeks ago, which I described here: http://drupal.org/node/132161. I couldn't view any page whose title began with "w". I couldn't even look at the logs, since that was "watchdog" (this was before I learned to use URL aliases). Eventually I tracked the problem to a missing character in one of the .htaccess rules.