MediaWiki: 500 Internal Server Error after authenticating

Question

I've been trying to research this for hours now, and I can't find any related articles.

I have an installation of MediaWiki that is under SSL and uses an extension of the AuthPlugin to authenticate users to an external database upon their login.

If I access the wiki without being logged in, I can see the content that anonymous users would see just fine. If, however, I log into the site, the wiki is no longer available, and only brings up a 500 Internal Server Error.

I've checked the error logs, and nothing shows up there corresponding to the bad request.

On a staging server, I have the same codebase running under non-SSL, and I do not encounter any issues when logged in, so I'm thinking there might be something to do with tthe combination of SSL and the AuthPlugin.

Anyone out there encounter similar using extensions of AuthPlugin under SSL?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Start by turning on PHP debugging and logging, so you can actually see the error instead of having to guess what the 500 means:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Errors_and_symptoms#MediaWiki_Errors

Answer 2

I ran into this same issue for one wiki user after an upgrade. All other wiki users could still log in. My issue was due to the user using a skin that did not work. After changing the user's skin to Vector(default) he could log in again. I couldn't figure out how to change another user's preferences as an Admin, so I ended up running an update statement to the mysql database. Hope this helps someone else.