Serendipity Forums

I was reading a thread regarding URL rewrites (http://board.s9y.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=20336), and tried the suggestion to change the URL rewriting to "Use Apache mod rewrite." Rather than fix the problem, though, it made my entire weblog inaccessible, returning the error "serendipity error: unable to connect to database - exiting." Since I can no longer access the admin panel, how do I fix this?

This parameter modifies the .htaccess file in the main directory of your blog. Do you have a backup of this file? If so, a restore of this file will probably solve the problem.

Regards
Mario

If you don't have a copy, please edit your .htaccess file and remove Rewrite-related settings (use "#" to comment). Then you can log-in again and reset the URL rewriting option to Disable URL rewriting.

I tried both replacing the .htaccess with my backup and removing the Rewrite lines from the .htaccess that got changed, but neither made a difference; I'm still seeing the "serendipity error: unable to connect to database - exiting."

Have you done any other changes in the config? Maybe at database or path settings?

You can check the correct database settings in serendipity_config_local.inc.php.

My complete actions were changing the URL rewriting drop-down, clicking save, and hitting refresh - I made no other changes. The serendipity_config_local.inc.php has an updated time stamp that matches the .htaccess, but none of my attempts to restore or correct that file made a difference, either.

Maybe your database is generally not available at the moment and you are serving the wrong issue? Did you check this?

I can still access the database through phpMyAdmin, and it was working perfectly right up until I made this change. Plus, no other settings related to the database were touched.

Still not sure why it crashed so hard, but I did a complete reinstall using the backup settings I had and am up and running.