25 September 2014, 0:06

Hi,

I've come across a couple of issues on our 1.9.2testing site.

1) Over the summer when adding artefacts (textboxes, external videos) something seemed to lock on a random basis maybe 5% of the time. I can normally still edit the textbox or add the video url, but can't change the default title of the block until I save changes to the page, then go back into editing. Today it's happening more frequently, and a few times I've found myself unable to edit anything (eg add url, specify height, etc). Our students just started back a couple of days ago so I wondered if it's a load issue on the site, or if anyone has a better suggestion?

2) As a separate (but probably related) issue, we've also in the past couple of days had issues with auth jumplinks from Moodle into Mahara (http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.9/mahoodle/mahoodle.html#link-to-specific-mahara-page-in-moodle) returning an error - perhaps half of the time they work, the rest they lead to a 'could not log you on' error message after a delay (but if you go back and try again the same link works second or third time).

Can anyone suggest a likely cause/solution for these issues?

Thanks, Gordon.

02 November 2014, 18:22

Hello Gordon,

Do you still have the issues mentioned under 1)?

As for the second one, can you please log in to Mahara without using the deep link? do you get error messages then as well? If so (or even just with the jump links), can you please check your error log and see if there is some more information? It could be that the two servers got out of sync timewise, restarting one or both (we usually restart Moodle) fixes it.

Cheers

Kristina

03 November 2014, 22:08

Hi Kristina,

I haven't encountered any of the issues in the past week or so. Your suggestion that the servers might be out of sync is interesting and certainly fits - I was convinced authentication was timing out when going from Moodle to Mahara. If this was the cause I'm guessing the server was restarted by central IT which sorted it, perhaps without anyone realising the connection with this issue. Unfortunately I don't have back-end access in my current role to verify what was happening.

Regards, Gordon.

04 November 2014, 0:00

I am the administrator at Gordon's site. We only really support use of the Moodle network block to SSO to Mahara and that works fine. We have had the time-sync issue with that a couple of times and are aware of this. This isn't the problem with those deep links. They also don't throw any errors in the logs that we can see.

It might be something we get back to in the future but as the 'proper' link works fine, it's intermittent (the worst kind of problem) and nothing showed up in a quick check, it's not something we will spend any time on. Unless someone has a sure-fire answer, of course...

09 November 2014, 13:19

Hello Gordon and Howard,

Thanks for the additional information. I hope the problems don't occur anymore or if they do, there is a reliable way of figuring out why the deep links don't work. I wonder if others who use the deep links experience(d) similar problems.

Cheers

Kristina