CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

There are lots of old posts on this, but the answers supplied there don't seem to quite suit my problem.
Thanks for all your awesome work folks. Loving civiCRM.

When running cron and when clicking on tracked links in civiMail emails I get this error:

Could not find valid configuration dir, best guess: /home/sixdegrees/public_html/sites/sixdegrees.org.au/modules/civicrm/../../sites<br/><br/>
If this is a standalone installation (i.e. not a Drupal or Joomla module) and you'd like to re-initialize it, <a href="../install/index.php?mode=standalone">click here</a>.

My cron command looks like this:
/usr/bin/php /home/example/public_html/sites/example.org.au/modules/civicrm/bin/cli.php -u "XXX" -p "YYY" -e Job -a execute -s example.org.au

I'm not sure when this error crept in because I've done a couple of updates since I last checked the logs or used civiMail

My civicrm.settings.php file is at /home/example/public_html/sites/example.org.au/civicrm.settings.php
My civicrm module is at /home/example/public_html/sites/example.org.au/modules/civicrm

I can work around the issue by putting a symlink at /home/example/public_html/sites/example.org.au/sites/civicrm.settings.php which points to ../civicrm.settings.php

I've tried resetting lots of things:

• under the admin menu,  "Directories", "Resource URLs" and "Cleanup Caches and Update Paths"
• erasing files/civicrm/ConfigAndLogs
• in my database setting the 'config_backend' to null in my civicrm_domain table,

I also tried putting a settings_location.php file in my civicrm directory (modules/civicrm/settings_location.php) but that resulted in a different error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/example/public_html/sites/example.org.au/modules/civicrm/settings_location.php:4) in /home/example/public_html/sites/example.org.au/modules/civicrm/CRM/Utils/System.php on line 361

It was only after a few hours that I came across a post here that prompted me to try sticking a symlink where civi wants it 

Can anyone help me actually understand what's going on and how to fix it properly?

Thanks a bunch.