04 February 2014, 21:14

On Wednesday morning last week, we suddenly discovered the following error on our Mahara installation, on both the logged-out users page and the logged-in users dashboard:

"studentfolio site unavailable: A nonrecoverable error occurred. This probably means you have encountered a bug in the system."

Users can login normally and all system components seem to be operating normally, apart from the dashboard, which shows the same error message.

We're sure nothing has changed on the server or Mahara settings so are completely baffled what can have caused this error. Would it be possible to get this error from any user generated content?

We were just wondering if anyone has experienced a similar error and could perhaps point us in the right direction of which component might be causing the problem.

We are running Mahara 1.7.2 on RHEL with a separate MySQL database.

I would have the attached logs but my server side colleagues say it appears everything in the log file is showing with errors.

Any advice much appreciated.

06 February 2014, 14:47

Hello Adam,

The error message you saw is a generic Mahara one, and no further information can be gleamed from it without more specific error information from the error log I'm afraid as we don't know what might have happened to your instance, what your users were doing, whether you have customizations etc.

One idea is to update to the latest stable release of Mahara 1.7 which is 1.7.4 if you want to stay in the same series and not upgrade and see if the error is still present.

Cheers

Kristina

12 February 2014, 5:21

Thanks for your advice Kristina, please find a link to details from the error log to see if this sheds some light on the issue. If not, then we'll try the update release route.

06 February 2014, 23:54

Do you have any plugins added that may be going to external sites? Maybe the plugin is trying to access something on that site that no longer exists and causing Mahara to have an error

12 February 2014, 5:15

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check the plug-ins we have enabled. 

14 February 2014, 5:51

Hi Adam,

Just looking through the error logs for things that stand out as homepage specific and there are a number of lines of errors are where the 'index.tpl' template file is not being found. This is the file that unless your custom theme has overridden it with it's own version will be found as theme/raw/templates/index.tpl.

I have managed to locally replicate the UI error error and the lines in your logs starting at [Tue Feb 11 12:31:18 2014] [error] [client 10.1.28.110] simply by deleting this file from theme/raw/templates.

As an initial step can you confirm this file exists either in your custom theme or as part of core still?

Stacey

14 February 2014, 6:30

Thank you so much for looking at this Stacey, your fix has resolved the UI error, Mahara is back! 

Stacey we owe you lots of thanks for this, you've made many students and academics (and the eLearning team) very happy!

Thanks again for rescuing us

Adam