Odd, nondescript error [an error occurred while processing this directive]

Question

I have been migrating a client's website from a Bluehost account to my own cPanel/WHM setup. I used the cPanel 'Backup Wizard' to create the export .tar (composed of home directory and mysql files, amoung some other things...) I suppose it's possible this is the problem, except that I didn't use the wizard to import the information, I just uploaded the tar.gz and untarred via SSH.

Whenever trying to access any php file, the following nondescript error prints into the php file, here's the file source:

<!-- SHTML Wrapper - 500 Server Error -->
[an error occurred while processing this directive]

I have seen ALOT of errors. However, in 8 years, I have never seen this error. I've spent hours trying to kill the process, re-upload the files, restarting all services. Nobody in my office has seen this error either.

Here's the log error: (some information removed from error, such as php address and remote pathing)

[Thu Feb 11 02:58:23 2010] [error] [client 00.000.0.0] SoftException in Application.cpp:367: Mismatch between target UID (535) and UID (534) of file "/home/site/public_html/index.php"

This same problem went unanswered here: http://forums.serverbeach.com/showthread.php?t=7906

Answer 1

Isn't this Apache's error message when a SSI or other directive inside the page goes wrong? The "SHTML Wrapper" points to that as well.

Could it be that you have a .htaccess file or a PHP autostart mechanism that embeds the PHP script into a surrounding (S)HTML file? If this is the case, it seems as if the surrounding file and the PHP file have different user IDs.

Can you post the full PHP and/or HTML file, or alternatively your project structure?