500 Internal Server Error- Any ideas?

[wrestlepower]

Hi guys, i'm getting the following error details when i try to log into my forums. Do any of you have any ideas wht may be casuing it? I originally thought it might be the hos going down, but on the few occasions that's happened in the past i get a 404 error.

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@wrestlepower.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.8a mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 PHP/5.2.5 Server at www.wrestlepower.net Port 80

Thanks for any help that's given.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

There can be many reasons for this, please check your server error log for more information on the details of this error.

A malformed .htaccess file is a common reason for this error. If you are using a .htaccess file, then please rename it to test if this solves the problem.

[wrestlepower]

well, checking the server error log, i have the following error listed several times today.

[Sun May 25 05:49:34 2008] [alert] [client 66.249.66.242] /home/forums/public_html/.htaccess: Invalid command 'SecFilterEngine', perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration

As you can see, it references .htaccess, so i renamed .htaccess as test as you suggested and it didn't make any difference. In case it helps, this is the contents of ht.access

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^wrestlestop.net$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.wrestlestop.net$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.wrestlepower.net [R=301,L]

Any ideas as to why this would suddenly happe now after several yers? ANyway, thanks very much for the help so far Marco.

[Marco van Herwaarden]

You probably have more then 1 .htaccess on your server.

/home/forums/public_html/.htaccess: Invalid command 'SecFilterEngine'

There is no 'SecFilterEngine' line in the .htaccess you are listing.

[wrestlepower]

Yes, i thought that was a bit odd.

however, thanks to you pointing out the obvious, the problem has been fixed. Thanks so much mate, you're a superstar.

Any idea why this would happen now out of the blue?

[Marco van Herwaarden]

Something must have changed:
- The problematic .htaccess itself
- Something in the webserver configuration

[SEOvB]

Try to disable mod security or make sure its setup properly and see if you still get the error.