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RSS problems
03 June 2009, 8:47
Hi,
We're having trouble getting RSS feeds of any kind to work and get the following error repeatedly:
There was an error with submitting this form. Please check the marked fields and try again.
| Block Title |
BBC |
| If you leave this blank, the title of the feed will be used |
| Feed location * |
| http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_uk_edition/front_page/rss.xml |
| URL of a valid RSS or ATOM feed |
| The feed appears to be invalid. The error reported was: connection failed (110) |
This is occurs with both our 1.0.9 and 1.1.3 installations. |
03 June 2009, 15:04
Hi -that error is generally firewall related, your server has to be able to make outbound port 80 connections
04 June 2009, 3:16
Our firewall lets us make outbound port 80 connections so that shouldn't be the issue.
04 June 2009, 17:04
Well then your best bet is to access the server, switch to the apache user, and try using curl on the rss feeds, because that's basically what Mahara is trying to do. Maybe you can get more information about the problem that way?
05 June 2009, 3:22
Sorry, I have no idea what curl does - please explain what needs to be done with it.
07 June 2009, 23:35
curl is a command line program for making HTTP requests. You can use it like:
nigel@sivlex:~$ curl -I mahara.org
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:33:44 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.0-8+etch15
Cache-Control: private, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0, max-age=0
Expires: Sun, 02 Feb 1986 00:00:00 GMT
Pragma: no-cache
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
If you run 'curl -I [hostname]', you should get a result. If you don't, e.g. it just hangs, or says the site is unreachable, that either means the remote site is down, or firewalling you, or you are being firewalled.
You can try that curl command with the RSS feeds that are broken to see if it's their sites which are blocking you.
24 June 2009, 3:56
I tried the curl -l command on our server and it returned a result so I don't think that's the problem.24 June 2009, 18:38
If your organization is using a proxy server than this can happen. You need to specify proxy settings in Mahara.
25 June 2009, 3:14
Our live server is an older version of Mahara which I can't upgrade for the immediate future and I can't find any proxy settings on the networking page - where can I find these please?
We do however have an up-to-date test mahara which I've added the proxy settings to but now I get a 404 error and a blank page when I try to add a feed.
25 June 2009, 21:27
Versions of Mahara before 1.1 didn't support proxy servers for RSS feeds, sorry. You could probably backport the patch, or make a patch yourself if you really needed.
Not sure what the issue could be with your newer Mahara though. Proxy settings/firewalls are difficult to get right 