20 December 2012, 15:39

Hello,

Actually, I'd like to say thanks for everyone share effort in making Mahara :)

I am using Mahara 1.5.3 on Linux, which I got from mahara.org. I'm using MySQL. the error_log file exist here endimag.com/error_log 

 I face this problem and need your opinions in solving it. I made a full backup of mahara and restored it on a new hosting server (shared hosting at Bluehost) The problem starts when a user wants to create a group, the following message appear.

Sitename: Site unavailable

Although this message,  the group is created. but when a user wants to open or join the group, the following message appear on the about tap (about of the group)  only.

20 December 2012, 17:53

when i changed the database with a new one,  the problem disappeard. so what do you think the solution for that!

20 December 2012, 20:29

Hi Marvel,

You're several security versions behind the stable 1.5 branch, so you should update for the security fixes; there were some really bad ones in it. Our 1.5.x releases are only minimal changes for security or really bad bugs, so they won't require re-training staff.

If the problem still happens, then we need to find out what the badly handled data in your database is. We can't know what it is unless we see the error logs from apache and/or your database.

If you go back to the old database then watch your logs with tail -f /path/to/your/errorlog, and re-try the action, paste for us what gets output. Remember to check for any personally identifying information like usernames or passwords and change them to fake strings if they are shown (user1234, or secretpassword, etc, and you can sanitize your url out if you want.

Thanks,
Melissa.

21 December 2012, 5:49

Thanks for your help. 

Actually, at that time I can not update the whole system. but if there is a way to update what  it 's related to security only, It'll be fantastic. I didn't get the meaning of "so they won't require re-training staff."

can you explain more, how can I do what are you said in the last two paragraphes, in details as i am a beginner. thanks in advance :)

i want to add to your info, that when i changed the host server i didn't change  what 's realted to it on the database, can this make the problem? 

21 December 2012, 12:34

Hi Marvel,

By "so they won't require re-training staff." I mean that mahara does not change in a way that means people have to learn a whole lot of changes. We only make minimal changes that most of the time, don't make things behave differently.

To update the security related things, you just need to replace your code with a new copy of the code, and then run the upgrade script. It might take some time to run, so you should announce some downtime. If you're not using git, remember to keep track of whatever customisations you made to the code, as they'll need to be re-done. And always remember to do a test run using backups first. ALWAYS take backups first :)

I don't understand what you mean by "i didn't change what 's realted to it on the database". Do you mean that the code was the same for the old database and the new database?

I think something happened some time in the past that caused your database to get some bad data, and that bad data wasn't in your new database.

We should consider that such bad data could exist and work around it, but if you have this problem, then this is not done. We should make it done, but we need to know what the bad data is.

You say you are running Linux, have you used the command "tail" on logs before?

I don't know what linux you are using, or the server setup, so this is a guess. On Ubuntu, this should work as it is the default place for the apache error log:

sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log

• sudo makes it ask for root privileges, if you're already root you can ignore that.
• tail is a utility that looks at the last lines written to a file. By default i looks at the last 10.
• -f is an option you pass to tail, to tell it "follow" the file, looking for new lines.

Hope this helps,
Melissa.