New to the community? Start here

avatars.php in server error logs

FYI: The following error appears quite often in my server error logs …

[Sat Aug 29 10:57:45 2009] [error] [client 66.249.65.214] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/tripawds/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/avatars.php:96) in /home/tripawds/public_html/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 865

I am not too concerned because ip address lookup reveals the error only seems to be thrown by various web crawlers and search bots.

Just wanted you to know, and confirm whether or not this might indicate an issue I should be concerned about. Thanks!

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:09:05
  • jcnjr
    • WP Core Meltdown

    IIS sites and those that use FastCgi. Is that you?

    Good question. I do not believe so. We’re on our own Linux server but it does host a number of our sites. And I see no reference to FastCGI in our server specs.

    Every IP address I looked up for these errors was a indeed a bot or crawler of some sort.

    There are only two lines that keep getting repeated in these errors avatars.php:96 & avatars.php:110, but all the errors refer to pluggable.php:865.

    Hope this helps, thanks for your thoughts.

  • jcnjr
    • WP Core Meltdown

    As of today, I noticed a couple new avatars.php related errors, this time thrown by an actual member …

    [Sun Aug 30 14:04:03 2009] [error] [client 71.111.201.78] PHP Warning: unlink(/home/tripawds/public_html/wp-content/avatars/user/1c1/) [function.unlink]: Is a directory in /home/tripawds/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/avatars.php on line 1235, referer: http://boinks.tripawds.com/wp-admin/users.php?page=user-avatar&updated=true&updatedmsg=Avatar+updated.

    and this one, a number of times …

    [Sun Aug 30 14:04:03 2009] [error] [client 71.111.201.78] PHP Warning: imagecopyresampled(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/tripawds/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/avatars.php on line 806, referer: http://boinks.tripawds.com/wp-admin/users.php?page=user-avatar&updated=true&updatedmsg=Avatar+updated.

    Any ideas about what these might indicate are gladly welcome. Many thanks.

  • Andrew
    • Champion of Loops

    [Sun Aug 30 14:04:03 2009] [error] [client 71.111.201.78] PHP Warning: unlink(/home/tripawds/public_html/wp-content/avatars/user/1c1/) [function.unlink]: Is a directory in /home/tripawds/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/avatars.php on line 1235, referer: http://boinks.tripawds.com/wp-admin/users.php?page=user-avatar&updated=true&updatedmsg=Avatar+updated.

    That one looks like it got tossed because the avatars plugin couldn’t delete the temporary image file saved when a user uploaded a new avatar. My guess is that the user uploaded an invalid file and the avatars plugin tried to remove it but it didn’t actually exist.

    [Sun Aug 30 14:04:03 2009] [error] [client 71.111.201.78] PHP Warning: imagecopyresampled(): supplied argument is not a valid Image resource in /home/tripawds/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/avatars.php on line 806, referer: http://boinks.tripawds.com/wp-admin/users.php?page=user-avatar&updated=true&updatedmsg=Avatar+updated.

    A user uploaded an invalid file via the alternative upload method.

    One thing I’ve noticed on Edublogs is that users don’t pay attention to the ‘Allowed Formats:jpeg, gif, and png’ note on the avatars page a lot of the time.

    Thanks,

    Andrew