I've deployed the slave site by copying content from master site. Admin/back end all seems correct -- I can open up individual articles and edit and save them. However, on the front end, I can only view the front page of my site. All the other pages get a 404 error. I'm sure the pages are in the db, otherwise I wouldn't see them in the admin side. What's going on?

I've determined it's a .htaccess and SEF issue, but after trying everything I can think of, it's not working. I have all the SEO settings on "yes", and I can view the index page, but no others. If I turn SEO off, then all the pages work.

My sites are set up like this:

/web/joomla/(master site)
/web/slave1/

I have a .htaccess in the mastersite and that one works fine.

I've tried putting .htaccess in /slave1; tried removing .htaccess from slave1; tried changing the rewrite base to different settings. None of this worked. It seems to me that my server is not even recognizing the .htaccess in /slave1

Check if the htaccess is a link or a physical copy present in your slave1.

With SEF, perhaps you also have to check the "rewritebase" parameter that sometimes need to be adapted. You will also find in the JMS Templates rule the possibility to compute a new value in the rewritebase parameter.

/web/slave1/ has a physical copy of the htaccess. But I've also tried using a symbolic link to the htaccess in /joomla/ and it still doesn't work.

The htaccess in /joomla/ has: RewriteBase /
The htaccess in /slave1/ I've tried:
Rewritebase /
Rewritebase /web/slave1/
Rewritebase /web/joomla/multisites/slave1/
and none of those have worked.

We aren't using cPanel and a hosting service. We have our own server. Each of our websites are on virtual servers running on the physical server.

htaccess is not something specific to cPanel but apache that is behind several admin tool like cPanel, Plesk, ....

As you mentioned this is a potential problem with htaccess, I suggest that you have a look in the documentation of the author of the extension that provide you the SEF (acesef, sh404sef, ...)

If you are not using any additional extension to manage the SEF and only using the native Joomla SEF, you have to check again with rewritebase that is mentioned by Joomla as the parameter that must be potentially adapted.
Try to put it in comment and review again all the possible values.


If you have a slave site in the HTTP://....../joomla/slave1 and that ...../joomla is your master, perhaps you have to test a rewritebase like Rewritebase /joomla/slave1/

OK, we solved it. The apache conf file on our server was unable to write to /slave1/rewrite.log and so that stopped the whole htaccess process. /slave1/rewrite.log is a symbolic link to /joomla/rewrite.log and that must be the problem (I'm guessing). We just took this line out of the apache conf file:
RewriteLog "/web/income/logs/rewrite.log"
and now it works like it's supposed to.

As a note for others with this issue: our particular server won't allow us to have /slave1/htaccess as a symbolic link; it only works if htaccess is a physical file. So if you have the same problem, check that first. Also, our htaccess file reads: Rewritebase / (we just use / and nothing else).

Thanks Edwin!