It's Never Litespeed

Posted By: Tony Baird

Last Updated: Sunday November 8, 2009

As Dr. House likes to say it’s never Lupus I like to say It’s never Litespeed.  We get support tickets all the time about how it worked in Apache it must be a Litespeed issue but it never seems to be that case.  Although users are convinced it always is until we take a quick look at the page or account and instantly know it had nothing to do with Litespeed.

Syntax Errors on PHP Files

Litespeed has been blamed for syntax errors on PHP files.  We’ve had cases where users timeout while uploading files to their space with us.  They then visit the page and there is some nasty syntax error.  It takes us looking at the file and seeing oh it sort of is missing half the file.  Opps!  Wasn’t litespeed after all.

Htacces Formating Issues

We get complaints about how litespeed did not properly parse a htaccess file once in a while.  We typically just take one look at the file and instantly know the issue.  Typically it comes from users on Mac’s who opened the htaccess file and saved it in Mac and it ended up adding all kinds of extra characters to the file.  The other cases have been scripts concatenating code onto the file and they forgot to go to the next line or even make a space so it breaks the htaccess file.

Mod Security Triggered

Another great case is the mod_security rule being triggered.  These are all the same really stupid scripts doing really stupid stuff that even without mod_security doesn’t work half the time.  For example http://mydomain.com/index.php?script=http://anotherdomain.com/anotherfile.txt or something like that.  We always block these requests due to the fact the majority are url includes being used to upload shell scripts.  Our Apache systems blocked these requests as well but apparently Litespeed is to blame for them.

Firewall Blocked Port

We run firewalls on all our servers and block the majority of ports.  It seems though most hosts don’t run anything so when someone comes from Apache and their script trying to access a service on port 4824 or something like that does not work.  We get a ticket about how Litespeed doesn’t work with x script and it worked with this other host on Apache.  We check the script and say oh it’s because you’re connecting to this ip on port 4824.  We’ll make an exception and suddenly it’s not Litespeeds fault at all!

So just remember it’s never Litespeed well except for that time it was.

Not Lupus

Okay it says it’s Not Lupus but imagine it said it’s not Litespeed because I don’t feel like changing that as I’m horrible with graphics.

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