#Nginx
A 26-Page Bilingual Site: Why .php Broke Every Link
The production page displayed PHP tags as raw text because the web server served .html as static files. Changing all 26 pages to .php broke links across the site. Then, after adding clean URLs, subpages bounced back to .php because the rewrite and 301 setup was only half done. This article includes the full .htaccess, eight cases for $base, and scripts that handle the whole site in one pass.
Laravel Behind a Proxy Sees 127.0.0.1 — Silent Form, No Error
A contact form on DirectAdmin says the sender is not human, sends no mail, and leaves every log silent — the cause is Laravel behind nginx-to-apache seeing $request->ip() as 127.0.0.1, failing the bot check and returning before the mail is sent, with an explanation of why TrustProxies must not use '*'
AI Crawler Overloads ?add-to-cart= — Block It Without Hurting SEO
Server load triggered an email alert. The logs showed that 84% of the day's traffic came from one AI crawler following add-to-cart links for every product. I added layers of protection with robots.txt, rel=nofollow and nginx limit_req while keeping all product pages indexable.
nginx heap overflow spans 15 years—version checks aren't enough
CVE-2026-42533 affects nginx versions 0.9.6 through 1.31.2, spanning 15 years, but actual exposure depends on the config, not the version. The problem is that news reports describe narrower conditions than the real ones. Checking against those reports can return "safe" even when the config still meets the conditions.
libmodsecurity3 + nginx — only ctl:ruleEngine exclusions work
ModSecurity v3 (libmodsecurity3) + nginx + OWASP CRS — the ctl:ruleRemoveById taught in the guides does nothing and fails silently. This article covers what I found after trying every approach: ctl:ruleEngine works, scoped with a Host+URI chained rule, and the exclusion file must load before CRS.
WordPress 500s, Empty debug.log — The Fatal Is in the Apache Log
WordPress returns 500 only on portfolio pages, but debug.log is empty — because the fatal error during theme rendering happens before WP logging is ready. The answer is in the apache error log (proxy_fcgi), along with a fix for a child theme with a stale template copied from an older parent version.
AdSense Says ads.txt Is Missing: Tracing the Logs Layer by Layer
The AdSense Sites page reports ads.txt as "Not found" even though the file exists and is correct — a forensic investigation using curl + access logs to prove, layer by layer, whether Googlebot visited and what it received. Case closed: nothing was blocking it; Google's own status was stale.
Tuning ModSecurity on DirectAdmin for Shared Hosting
The 4 additions I made beyond DA defaults — exclusions before CRS, a 1-hit credscan ban, a fix for the incorrect MODSEC_LOG path shipped by DA, and a self-heal cron to recover from rebuild overwrites