26 May 2013, 14:26

Hi,

on a local machine, the installer keeps asking for postgresql even though I set it to $cfg->dbtype   = 'mysql5'; 

The error is below:

Mahara: Site unavailable

26 May 2013, 22:01

Hello Dirk,

Sorry to hear about your connection problem. I know you are not novice in Mahara, but, as stupid it may seem to be, may I suggest to check your config.php once again. I would suggest to start with a fresh config.php form the git and edit it accordingly. Check you database name, username and password. At the first sight I would think that your config.php contains a typo error somewhere.

If this doesn't work, please come back here.

Regards,

-dajan

27 May 2013, 3:04

Thank you Dajan,

the problem was the database collation. It was set to utf16_general_ci and had to be changed to utf8_general_ci for it to work. I am slowly weaning myself off GUI tools but keep making new databases with phpmyadmin. On this new computer I am working with,  for some reason the default collation is UTF16 when I choose UTF. 

After I did a git clone (git clone git://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara.git ) and it still was not working I looked at the database a little more closely. Had I followed the instructions here https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Installing_Mahara a little more closely, I would have noticed that UTF8 is required.

Thanks again.

Dirk

27 May 2013, 4:13

I should add that a previously working database which was exported and then imported using the command line was not working also as the collation seems to have changed during import.
 

27 May 2013, 7:51

Hi Dirk

Happy you found the error. I will add this to my personal database of problems<->solutions. Thanks for this.

Regards,

-dajan

27 May 2013, 12:16

Thanks for the info, Dirk. I've filed a bug to see about adding this to the environment sanity check Mahara does, so that users will get a more useful error message. :)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1184450

Cheers,

Aaron