phpBB 1.4.4 Permissions Problems

[Frank Hagan]

Yeah, that's right ... phpBB 1.4.4 ... the old, even more hackable version!

I have a customer with an old forum, and I'd like to convert it to static HTML pages, or update it and import it into a SMF "Lo-Fi" version for read-only access. I can't really merge it with their existing forum due to username incompatibilities.

But I can't seem to make the old forums run on my server to start to convert them to some other format. Even though I've checked the permissions a dozen times, I get the error message "The config file is writeable by the webserver" with an admonition to chmod the config.php file to 644. It is at 644 already (and I've tried other settings, such as 444), and I'm wondering if anyone knows what it could be.

My server has been upgraded to php5, but I've inserted the line
"AddHandler application/x-httpd-php4 .php" in .htaccess to see if it would run only under php4. I'm wondering if it could be phpSuExec? The script is old enough it might not be compatible.

[Frank Hagan]

I have a work-around, even though I never actually resolved the problem of getting phpBB 1.4.4 to run on my server. Because of security issues, I would not have let it stay there anyway, but I did want to get the forum transferred over to a new, secure script.

But copying the files over, and doing an export of the mySQL tables and re-importing them on my server, gave me hope that it could still be done. All the data was there, even if phpBB 1.4.4 wouldn't run.

The trick was to find the phpBB2 2.0 distro (no longer on the phpBB site). I found it tucked away in a back corner of the phpBBHacks site. It features an upgrade method from 1.4.4 to 2.0 that worked ... the second time I tried it (after dropping all the tables in the database, and re-uploading the .sql file). It inserts itself into the same database, so if something goes awry, it trashes the database and you have to restore it.

To convert the forum to SMF, I had to have it at the latest version of phpBB, 2.0.23. I found I could just upload the /install/ directory from that distro and run the upgrade_to_latest.php file to update the database to the most recent configuration.

Then a regular conversion to phpBB3 or SMF can be done. There were still some issues with field names in my conversion to SMF. But I resolved those and now have the old phpBB 1.4.4 forums up and running as a "read only" archive in SMF.