Categories in the Admin panel do not load-ERR (3):Warning:simplexml_load_string():Entity:line9:parser error:Premature end of data in tag config line2

Question

When going into CATALOG --) Manage categories --) and trying to load the details of a specific category - it comes up blank after it tries to pull the information (you can see it's doing that when the "Please wait" sign with the progress wheel comes on but something seems to get in the way and nothing comes up.

The exact Error in the Magento root->Var->log-> System.log file is:

"2016-08-13T23:51:01+00:00 ERR (3): Warning: simplexml_load_string(): Entity: line 9: parser error : Premature end of data in tag config line 2 in /home/flower/public_html/lib/Varien/Simplexml/Config.php on line 510"

Categories is the ONLY thing not working in the Admin.

I've done this so far:

• disabled ModSec completely (we had a problem with this before in the same situation)
• according to the hosting company - PDO and mysql extensions are currently set up properly
• SOAP extensions are enabled on server
• ran the following command:

curl -l 'http://www.example.com/index.php/api/v2_soap/index/wsdl/1/' > /tmp/wsdl.xml

but then no output was provided as you can see below:

root@new [/]# curl -l 'http://example.com/index.php/api/v2_soap/index/wsdl/1/' > /tmp/wsdl.xml % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0

root@new [/]# cat /tmp/wsdl.xml root@new [/]#

• The Timeout is set to 300, I've increased KeepAlive timeout as well from 5 to 30 but the issue still persists.
• The related databases are OK

Magento version 1.9.1

Answer 1

After talking with the hosting company for hours (2 days actually) - they finally came up with the solution:

ModSecurity rule '214540' causes the error in execution of the Magento script even if this rule is whitelisted for my account.

They force disabled this exact rule ID in my ModSecurity configuration permanently and everything works now. I hope this will help someone with the same problem.