After the cPanel hack last March or April, our VPS was moved from a Centos78 machine to an AlmaLinux8 machine. None of my web apps now work. Some had been working more than four years. The hosting company’s support team has been unable to get it to work. This the the guts of their last email concerning the problem:
We ran a thorough diagnostic pass directly on your VPS and can rule out several things with confidence:
- Not a firewall or network block. Requests made from the server to itself still fail, so nothing external is involved, not our network, not our firewall.
- Not a missing or incompatible library. Your MeterWizard binary loads cleanly with all dependencies resolved. There’s no glibc symbol error, which is what you’d expect to see if this were really a glibc version shortfall.
- Not a container level restriction. We confirmed your container configuration hasn’t changed.
- Not a system zlib mismatch. Your app bundles its own compression library instead of using the OS’s.
- Not resource limits or file capabilities. Both look normal.
What we’re actually seeing is that every Xojo app on the server fails the same way when serving CSS and framework assets. The requests come back with correctly generated headers (proper ETag, content type, cache settings) but a 404 status and an empty body. That means the app recognizes the resource but isn’t returning its content. That’s a specific behavior in how the Xojo web framework serves its embedded assets, and it’s not something we can diagnose or fix from the OS or infrastructure side.
My recommendation is to reach out to a Xojo developer or Xojo’s own support team with these specifics. They’ll have visibility into the framework’s resource serving code that we don’t, and they’re in a much better position to tell you whether this is a known issue on RHEL family distros or something particular to how this app was built or deployed.
@Dean_Davidge
Centos 7 has been EOL for a long time, did you mean provider had you on CentOS 8 Stream?
Well anyway Alma Linux 8 now (security updates good until 2029)
What version of Xojo did you use to build Web App? And Stand alone correct?
Well it is not a know issue in the RHEL family distro’s as I have Xojo Web Apps running on Rocky Linux 9 and 10.
Have they tried running ldd against the web app and see if any libraries are missing?
Again though what version of Xojo was used to create the Web App?
I haven’t seen reports of Xojo web running in AlmaLinux8, looks like Xojo hasn’t tested on that (I only see mentions of other Linux OS as supported by Xojo)
A search on the forum only showed your post about Glibc.
ok, well since they have not worked since April I would say they are not going to work any time soon then.
How did they verify you are not missing any libraries or non supported ones?
You cannot do any terminal commands and have to go through them?
I found your problem intriguing. So I downloaded AlmaLinux 8.10. A finnicky little number, that one! It would not install on my Core I3 test computer (that has run Debian, Mint, Arch, Budgie and surely a few others happily.). (Perhaps the way I created the USB key, but I tried with dd, Balena Etcher, and Minsstick on Linux Mint, and with Rufus (iso mode, dd mode) on Windows 11) Then, I created a new VM on my dev Proxmox VE machine. The installation finally went fine. Added my user to wheel (sudoers), installed openssh and copied my working web app (on Debian) to the downloads folder for my user, using Filezilla. Granted executable permission. I started a terminal window and ran my web app. An error was displayed:
error while loading shared libraries: libunwind.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory.
I installed epel (extra packages for enterprise linux), updated the cache and installed libunwind. I also disabled the firewall, active by default (which I forgot to do earlier). My application now runs. I am however unable to reach it with a browser from my admin computer. I am also unable to reach it from a browser running on the server itself. It should be noted that I offload https handling to a reverse proxy, so the copied app uses http on the test VM. Which Firefox does not like… Brave lets me work.
Is this what you are experiencing?
edit: replaced bad word with “number”…
new edit: Almalinux 8.1 is old. The current release is 10.2. I wonder why your service provider migrated your VPS from a EOL OS to an old OS that is already out of active support (although security support continues into 2029)
Personally I would not give my business to a host that in 2026 switched me to RHEL 8 (or 1:1 clone )
But according to technical support as stated above: - Not a missing or incompatible library. Your MeterWizard binary loads cleanly with all dependencies resolved. There’s no glibc symbol error, which is what you’d expect to see if this were really a glibc version shortfall.
Yes usually it is libunwind when it comes to GUI
Hopefully the support can straighten this out for the OP
+1 for the OS version used. I just don’t understand why they would migrate to an OS this old. I guess that they like doing migrations. Do they charge for it?
I was hoping to see something meaningful reproducing the issue locally. But I can see what I think is the problem, without any hint as to why this is happening. I think that it is now time for the OP to log an Issue. Or if anyone has suggestions to diagnose the problem, perhaps I can try. I will keep the VM alive for a few days.
In my case, you’re right. No SSH access either.
That being said, from my limited knowledge on the matter, different providers may configure cPanel differently. I don’t know whether cPanel could offer SSH access from other providers.
