30 August 2012, 10:43

I have recently upgraded from 1.4x to 1.5.2 and everything seemed fine until it tried to logon via our moodle site. I had networking set up before which worked fine. Now i get the following message.

I have installed another separate mahara install on the same web server and the network page works fine but on my old one I get this error message saying Mahara cannot generate a SSL key. I have checked that the openssl is installed and the php module is enabled but not sure how to fix the problem.

02 September 2012, 9:33

Hi,

there are two places where Mahara triggers that error. We need to add a bit of code to debug why the error is triggering.

Edit file api/xmlrpc/lib.php and around line 1428 you'll see these lines of code:

        if (!$new_key = openssl_pkey_new($config)) {
            throw new ConfigException(get_string('errorcouldnotgeneratenewsslkey', 'auth'));
        }

        if (!$csr_rsc = openssl_csr_new($dn, $new_key, $config)) {
            // This behaviour has been observed once before, on an ubuntu hardy box. 
            // The php5-openssl package was installed but somehow openssl 
            // wasn't.
            throw new ConfigException(get_string('errorcouldnotgeneratenewsslkey', 'auth'));
        }

Change them to:

        while ($err = openssl_error_string()) {
            /* just consume previous error messags and do nothing */
        }
        if (!$new_key = openssl_pkey_new($config)) {
            log_debug('openssl_pkey_new() failed');
            while ($err = openssl_error_string()) {
                log_debug($err);
            }
            throw new ConfigException(get_string('errorcouldnotgeneratenewsslkey', 'auth'));
        }

        while ($err = openssl_error_string()) {
            /* just consume previous error messags and do nothing */
        }
        if (!$csr_rsc = openssl_csr_new($dn, $new_key, $config)) {
            log_debug('openssl_csr_new() failed');
            while ($err = openssl_error_string()) {
                log_debug($err);
            }
            // This behaviour has been observed once before, on an ubuntu hardy box. 
            // The php5-openssl package was installed but somehow openssl 
            // wasn't.
            throw new ConfigException(get_string('errorcouldnotgeneratenewsslkey', 'auth'));
        }

Then make sure you have $cfg->log_dbg_targets set to LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG (it is by default, unless you've changed it. This will send the output of log_debug() calls to your PHP error logs.

You should see which of the two functions is actually failing and openssl error messages telling why that function is failing.

Saludos.
Iñaki.

02 September 2012, 11:34

Cheers for the reply. I did what you said and got the following error messages.

It looks like the second if statement failed. Not sure why or how to fix it though. Any ideas?

17 September 2012, 23:45

Hi Steve,

It looks a bit like the configuration of the auth instance might not be right.

configuration file routines:NCONF_get_string:no value

and

asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_mbstring_ncopy:string too short

suggest as much.

Did you upgrade moodle at the same time, or anything like that?

Thanks,
Melissa.