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Wordpress multisite is down after upgrade Ubuntu to 16.04

Posted on March 24, 2017

So I was using an One-click-Wordpress on Ubuntu 14.04 from 2015. I converted it to multisite in 2016 and still running fine with 5 sites total (with different domains).

Problems came yesterday when I decied to do an do-release-upgrade to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04. Without any active droplet snapshot. Yes, that was awful.

After the upgrade, my sites are still down. I sent a DigitalOcean support ticket to get me through some droplet check. Then I checked apache2 service and it was not running caused by syntax errror ‘php_flag’. And so I reinstalled php and check some other LAMP stack related stuffs.

After a while, my sub-sites are back online, as I can access them via their own domain. But I cannot access my main site, the original domain. And so I cant backup things from there.

These are the symptoms:

  1. Access my-main-domain (through cloudflare) get only a blank page with code 500 error.
  2. Access my-droplet-ip and I got redirect to http://my-main-domain/wp-signup.php?new=my-droplet-ip
  3. My sub-sites still running.

I thinks this is is some multisites config got messed up after the upgrade but do not know how to solve the problem. So I appreciate any help from the community, thank you very much.



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@jtittle @hansen Thanks guys, my theme was from 2014 so I think it has some parts that are incompatible with PHP7. I did restore an ubuntu 14.04 and transfer data in. After some config, my multisite now works fine. I will upgrade to ubuntu 16.04 later, after changing theme.

I took a break and tried to move the wordpress multisite to another droplet. I created new Ubuntu 16.04 droplet, fresh installed Wordpress, activated multisite, pointed domain to the new Wordpress. It was running fine. But after overwrite it with old data and sql with phpmyadmin, the same blank page happened.

So… is there anyway to export data and import to new wpsite without access to the wp-admin?

@Jokohama

If you would, please post you configuration for the site that you’re having the issue with so we can take a closer look at it.

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