Upgrading to WordPress 2.0 Help – upgrade.php Gives Me Server Error 500
So I carefully followed all of the steps in the WordPress upgrade guide but when I got to step 9 (Run the WordPress upgrade program) I was hit with a server 500 error*
I guessed properly that it was a permissions problem. I tried setting all of the permissions to every WordPress related file I could find to 755 but it didn’t help.
Finally in one last frusterated attempt I changed the permissions on every single file in my directory to 755 and that worked. So the problem was probably the permission on some file that I didn’t think of before.
If you can ssh into your web hosting account you can just run something like this:
$ chmod -R 755 html
Of course there are probably security issues or other problems with having every single file have permissions of 755 so probably don’t leave them like that. (An exercise left to the reader 
)
*Specifically it said:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.Please contact the server administrator, root@peregrinehw.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
[tags]WordPress 2.0,chmod,Permissions[/tags]