Forums | Mahara Community

Mahara/Moodle integration /
Some Users Unable to Access Mahara Via Moodle


anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 19

09 February 2009, 7:30

We are trying to roll out our Mahara integration across the whole school now and I am finding a handful of accounts that the SSO does not work for.

Does anyone have any idea why some accounts and not others may be failing the SSO?

Here is an example, user 7rbarron. The screen is blank, no error message and nothing output to the screen. I have tried echoing out a statement at the top of land.php and nothing happens - so it must be bombing out somewhere before it reaches land.php itself i think. Here is the url displayed in the browser:

http://roydshall.org/portfolio/auth/xmlrpc/land.php?token=437e2b0c623d2f8c9f1106d2ee02e1b437a0aabd&idp=http://roydshall.org/moodle&wantsurl= 

It's a strange one because other users get straight in and are redirected to the homepage... 

Any help greatly appreciated,

 dan 

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 19

09 February 2009, 7:32

I know it's a long shot - but could it be trailing whitespace after the closing php tag somewhere?

 EDIT: but then it's only happening for a few user accounts, so it can't be that our I'd have a problem for all users I would think...

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 6

10 February 2009, 5:05

Hi Dan,

I think it might be worth to check that both server clocks (Moodle and Mahara) are synchronised. If there is a  slight difference of even a few secs, it can prevent SSO from working. Now I can't explain why some users would experience the issue and others not. But I had that kind of problem with Kerberos authentication and it was all down to the server not being synchronised with the workstations.

 Just a thought...

 Christian.

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 19

10 February 2009, 10:00

Thanks ever so much for your input! :-)

I don't think it is going to help me though, firstly because Mahara and Moodle are running on the same server. And secondly because it still happens when I use Moodle's 'login as' feature. So from the same machine  I can move between different acounts and some connect and others bomb out...

 ...the mystery continues...

 dan 

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 19

10 February 2009, 10:16

Strangely enough, the 'crash' page on internet explorer is:

http://roydshall.org/moodle/auth/mnet/jump.php?hostid=9

whilst firefox displays the landing page. So it guess it is the jump/land that fails in some way. Does anyone have any idea what these two browsers appearing to fail on different pages might mean?

 I am totally puzzled by this one and I can feel the SLT closing in, eeeek ;-)

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 6

10 February 2009, 11:16

Did you check your apache error log? There may be a clue in it. At least in my case, Mahara logged its errors to the apache log.

Christian.

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 19

10 February 2009, 12:19

Cracked it!

Thanks for the reminder to check apache logs. I found the clue there. It seems that having the option 'Update user info on login' switched on in the xmlrpc settings was causing me grief. I have switched off and it's now working. I suspect this is a bug and will report it because it only happens for some users. For some reason one of the database queries is returning two rows when only one is expected. I also have all fields locked so that users cannot give themselves stupid names - maybe this is a conflict? i'm not sure.

 Apache log says:

 [WAR] 20 (lib/errors.php:654) get_record_sql found more than one row. If you meant to retrieve more than one record, use get_records_*, otherwise check your code or database for inconsistencies, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221] Call stack (most recent first):, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * log_message("get_record_sql found more than one row. If you mea...", 8, true, true) at /home/www/portfolio/lib/errors.php:90, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * log_warn("get_record_sql found more than one row. If you mea...") at /home/www/portfolio/lib/errors.php:654, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * SQLException->__construct("get_record_sql found more than one row. If you mea...") at /home/www/portfolio/lib/dml.php:282, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * get_record_sql("SELECT * FROM "artefact"  WHERE "artefacttype" = ?...", array(size 2)) at /home/www/portfolio/lib/dml.php:247, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * get_record("artefact", "artefacttype", "introduction", "owner", "207") at /home/www/portfolio/artefact/internal/lib.php:148, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * ArtefactTypeProfile->__construct(0array(size 1)) at /home/www/portfolio/lib/user.php:228, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * set_profile_field("207", "introduction", "Imani") at /home/www/portfolio/auth/xmlrpc/lib.php:465, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * AuthXmlrpc->import_user_settings(object(User), object(stdClass)) at /home/www/portfolio/auth/xmlrpc/lib.php:264, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221]   * AuthXmlrpc->request_user_authorise("06a63a69f7473f5c3eac68a6f7f07a6de7aa381d", "http://roydshall.org/moodle") at /home/www/portfolio/auth/xmlrpc/land.php:94, referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?
[Tue Feb 10 15:51:36 2009] [error] [client 10.75.48.221] , referer: http://roydshall.org/moodle/?

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 6

10 February 2009, 13:36

Hooray! Congratulations. I am glad you found a solution.
anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 6

18 May 2009, 11:21

we just had a similar issue.

some users could login and some could not. (when comming from a Moodle system.)

finally, i found out that the Mahara database schema collation was initiated with a latin1_swedish_ci encoding so i changed it to utf8_unicode_ci because we have users with hebrew letters usernames (in moodle) and mahara was unable to recognize it because of the db encoding settings inside table auth_remote_user >> field "remoteusername"

now, it works fine.

btw, i initially setup the XMLRPC to "update user info on connections" which does not give us any problems. funny.

thanks for all the idaes ( it helped!)

anonymous profile picture
Account deleted
Posts: 1643

18 May 2009, 17:13

Hi - interesting point, Mahara should enforce that people create UTF8 database - also, it should be a case sensitive collation, which means utf8_unicode_cs. I have filed a bug report for this, and will put some info in the installation instructions.
11 results