Plugin Support
wfphil
(@wfphil)
Sorry to hear that you are having this problem.
Can you check the server error logs. These are usually available via your hosting control panel. If they are not, you can contact your hosting provider and ask for them. They should give you some idea as to why that happened. If you need help interpreting the error log you can share a snippet of it here in this forum thread. Remember to remove any sensitive or identifying information from it such as your domain name.
What you can also try is to temporarily deactivate all other plugins and switch to one of the default themes that comes pre-packaged with WordPress, such as the theme called “2016”. This may rule out a theme or plugin conflict.
Once you have done this and you can successfully activate Wordfence then deactivate Wordfence. Now activate the theme that you want to use and see if you can now activate Wordfence. Repeat this process with your plugins individually until a point where you may find that your theme or a plugin causing the issue of Wordfence not activating. Please let us know the outcome and we can investigate further for you.
There are no errors. I’m currently trying on a new instance with a clean WP install, default theme, no other plugins. The page has just been “loading” for about 10 minutes now, since pressing “Activate”.
P.S. I am a developer and plugin author as well 😉
Plugin Support
wfphil
(@wfphil)
Thanks for the feedback Jeff. I will seek assistance from co-workers to see if we can deduce what is happening here for you.
It’s quite odd, actually. I’ve never seen anything like it. If you give me an email address, I can give you (or whoever else) credentials tee see what I’m talking about.
So, I downgraded to 6.0.1, and that worked. Then, I tried 6.0.25, which worked. Then, I tried 6.1.1, which did not work. So, something from 6.1.1 on is causing this issue, likely the Web Application Firewall, as it was added in this version.
Plugin Support
wfphil
(@wfphil)
Hello Jeff.
Thanks for the information, I will pass this on. The only time we will login to your website to take a look is if you are a premium customer and you would have to open a premium support ticket on our website.
Plugin Support
wfphil
(@wfphil)
Hello jeff,
After asking co-workers for help they think that the problem may be related to the wflogs directory in some way. Does this directory exist, and if so, do you have any files in this directory?
/wp-content/wflogs
They have suggested looking at the AWS documentation below to set up a shared persistent storage for the wflogs directory if this does seem to be the cause of the problem:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/services-efs.html
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This reply was modified 9 years, 2 months ago by
wfphil.
That’s the thing. The wflogs directory is a symlink to a directory on an NFS share. So, I’m already doing that. With that said, the usual files in that directory are there, but they’re empty…
For some reason, Wordfence seems to be having a problem using the symlinked directory. Note that the same method is used for wp-content/uploads and it works as expected. I would expect Wordfence to as well… Does the log directory have a constant that can be changed, so I can set it directly to the directory, rather than as a symlink?
It looks like it could have something to do with the fact that NFS doesn’t support file locking and the class wfWAFStorageFile uses it extensively…
EFS appears to essentially be NFS, so not sure that would work any differently…
I tested using that same NFS shared directory as a symlink to wp-content/wflogs on a different (non-EB) server, and it worked. This is odd…
So, after comparing the mount options for the NFS shares between the two servers, I noticed a difference: The one on which it works has the nolock option. Lo-and-behold, I added the nolock option to the mount command on the EB instance and it works!
Plugin Support
wfphil
(@wfphil)
Hi Jeff,
I was about to seek further assistance from co-workers so I am glad that you sorted it out. Thanks for letting us know as I will pass on the solution you found internally with my co-workers in case other users have a similar issue.
