Menus/Articles/everything gets 404s

[shelden]

Hi all,

I recently inherited a Joomla 1.5.10 site. After cleaning up after an intrusion (yes, we're going to upgrade to 3.x), none of the internal links work. I get a a custom 404 page (and 404s when I telnet to port 80 and request the pages in question.)

Whether the links are menu items, or articles that make it to the front page.

I can see the articles, at least, in mySQL; and under administration/. However, they don't get served by Joomla.

I ended up putting bare index.html files for all the menu links for now...but I'm thinking we accidentally removed some .php or a .htaccess parameter that would map to a joomla-thingy that would pull the articles etc out of the DB?

Any ideas?

Clearly, I'm new to Joomla; and I didn't find anything on stack overflow or the FAQ that seemed to apply.

Thanks,
--Brian Shelden
www.windycityweasels.org

Code: Select all

$ telnet www.windycityweasels.org 80
Trying 184.168.233.1...
Connected to windycityweasels.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD /game-reports/wcw-2017-season HTTP/1.0
Host: www.windycityweasels.org

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2016 04:10:03 GMT
Server: Apache
Accept-Ranges: bytes

[sozzled]

I recently inherited a Joomla 1.5.10 site. After cleaning up after an intrusion (yes, we're going to upgrade to 3.x), none of the internal links work. I get a custom 404 page (and 404s when I telnet to port 80 and request the pages in question.)

OK, first things first:

J! 1.5.10 is really old—considering it was released more than 6½ years ago (this should probably be setting the alarm bells off in your head by now)—outdated, vulnerable to attack and the whole J! 1.5 project was declared dead, buried, cremated/unsupported 3½ years ago and I guess I'm not telling you anything you don't already know.

I can understand why someone may have left their J! 1.5.10 website to someone else. By now it's probably a total mess and "404 errors" are also (probably) the thin edge of the wedge, the first step in a downward spiral of patch/band-aid/worry and eventual ruin.

However, there may be some good news; something worthwhile that you can salvage.

The short answer to your question is that there's no short answer to the solution. It rather depends on your perseverance, your dedication to the task, your investment of time (and, ultimately, money if you want to migrate from J! 1.5 to J! 3.x but that's a separate story in itself).

Knowing all these things and realising, of course, that our memories are short-lived (and there's an incredible amount of stuff I don't remember about J! 1.5), you may or may not get all the answers you're looking for in terms of patching up your site so that it returns to its former "glory". It's possible that you may be able to salvage something from your site (the users, the articles, the media) but the real question is simple: what do you really hope to gain?