Like many others of you I own a Synology which I use to run a various load of servers. It is my trustworthy friend which is delivering NAS based storage to my VMware environment for quite some years now. Over the years I have been exploring the Synology quite a bit more and learned to appreciate many other features as well like “Web Station” which I use to host some WordPress websites.
Synology Diskstation DS2514+
There is one thing that I dread however. Quite ever so often Synology releases a new version of the Disk Station Manager (DSM). New featrures are added, old features are discontinued and security fixes are applied. This is also the case for the numerous packages that are available in Package Center. All nice and perfect you would say. Great job Synology! However this time I was presented with the following screen when trying to reach the websites I host on the box. All websites seemed to have been broken somehow and present the “HTTP ERROR 500” message.
Of course these things happen at the most inconvenient of times. Since I did not want to present visitors to the webpage with an HTTP ERROR 500 I decided to give Google a try and search for the error. Unfortunately it seems to be the most common error you can find so the resolution is not dictated and spelled out for you. However some peoples PHP Extensions seems to have been messed up by the DSM upgrade so I decided to give look at my PHP settings first.
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In my case where I use PHP 5.6 it seems the update messed with my PHP extensions. As you can see the “mysqli” extension checkbox is unmarked. Since WordPress makes use of the “MariaDB” database which is a fork of MySQL all started to make sense now.
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Just re-enable the extension, click “OK”and presto! You should be able to give your website a go again!