28 November 2008, 13:54

I have sucessfully installed Mahara onto our server and set up the SSO with Moodle, and I like what I see so far!

The only problem we are having is that we can not upload any files. We can create folders but whenever we try to upload a file the icon just comtinually saya "uplaoding file" and it never finishes!

I ahd a look through teh old forums and the ones over on EduForge and it looks to me like the bug with the file prograsm not running correctly when trying to recognise mime types on Mac OS X servers.

However, we are running Mahara version 1.0.6 (2008040209) on a Ubuntu 8.04 server,

PHP Version 5.2.4-2ubuntu5.3, MySQL 5.0.51.

To test things I download Mahara version 1.0.6 (2008040209) at home and installed it on to my box (Ubuntu 8.10, PHP Version 5.2.6-2ubuntu4, MySQL 5.0.67) and it all worked straight out the box!

I can not work out what is configured differently to stop files uploading on our work server and letting it work at home!

Any suggestions greatly received.

Jon

28 November 2008, 17:01

There could be lots of reasons, for example:

• The files you're uploading are too big - most servers default to a 2MB limit (unlikely)
• Your server has some kind of limitation, e.g. on exec() being called
• /usr/bin/file isn't installed on your server

29 November 2008, 7:27

Hi Nigel,

Thanks for replying;

• Our server has it's upload limit set at 100mb, which is working fine with our Moodle install. 
• file is definitly installed at /usr/bin/file
• I do not think there is any restriction on exec() being called - certainly not that I can find in our PHP settings..

We did have a look through our error logs and the only one we could find at the time of uploading was a missing blank.html file being called. I had a look through the old forums about this and followed the recomendations there and just created blank.html (I can't off hand remember which folder I put it in!)

I will try the error logs again to see if I can find anything.

Is there a way my apache set up could be stopping exec() from working?

29 November 2008, 19:05

The missing blank.html is irrelevant, but it does show you're looking in the right place at least.

It's not apache that limits whether exec() can be called, it's php. Either safe_mode (which must be off otherwise mahara wouldn't install) or the disable_functions PHP setting. But to be honest I'm not sure that is going to be the answer to your issue, as you would have got a message in the logs about that.

01 December 2008, 4:41

I thought it was PHP that would stop it. You can see our php info here: http://shunsley.eriding.net/info.php As far as I can see there is nothing tehre that would stop file from running...

I will recheck the logs to see if anything else shows up.

Am I right in thinking that version 1.1 will not have the call to exec() to upload files?

01 December 2008, 16:25

It doesn't look like there's anything there that would stop it, though as a side note you should up your post_max_size setting a tiny bit to allow upload of files close to or exactly 100M.

The 1.1 version doesn't need to call file, yes.

02 December 2008, 6:55

Thanks for the tip - I have upped it to 105M now.

We are still testing Mahara at the moment, so I think we will wait for the 1.1 release before going live with any students.

04 December 2008, 19:51

I would like to say that I have installed mahara a few hours ago for testing. I have more or less the same configuration:

Ubuntu 8.04.1

MySQL 5.0.51

 PHP 5.2.4

Apache 2.2.8 (with mod_fcgid, suexec, etc. i don't use mod_php)

And I have exactly the same problem. 

Error log says:

Premature end of script headers: upload.php, referer: http://www.crucedecaminos.org/port/artefact/file/

1. /usr/bin/file is there.

2. size is above 50MB

I will try disabling eAccelerator because it caused some problems to me during the installation. (I had to disable it and install, then enabled it again).

04 December 2008, 20:15

We have never tried running Mahara in cgi mode, so it might be that this is the problem. We've never supported running Mahara in cgi mode before so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the issue.

What version of eaccelerator do you have? 0.9.5.1 was known to be buggy. 

04 December 2008, 20:57

I compiled eAccelerator 0.9.5.3 ,

And I read somewhere about the bug in version 0.9.5.1 and Mahara,  when looking for an explanation about not being able to install mahara. Also I read that this bug was fixed. 

 Anyway even with 0.9.5.3 I had to turn off eaccelerator for the install proccess to finish and then turn it on again (I used a custom php.ini for that domain). 

I don't know much about Mahara but it seems i can do almost everything, but mod_fcgid gives me warnings about some php functions in block.php and mahara.php when editing views. But I installed it today , for testing, because I liked the layout. I had not tested any eportfolio, so I didn't know what was

 And it seems to work with cgi and eaccelerator more or less. If you want to check the testing site http://www.crucedecaminos.org/port.

By the way, the installation stopped with eaccelerator in different points during the installation, sometimes in the artifact.xxx or in auth.xxx.

Anyway I will keep investigating to try to find out more info.

Probably I would not use mahara for students or any community untill there is an spanish translation. Meanwhile I will keep testing and learning.

 I posted just to help a little bit with information. 

ah,, and thank you for creating mahara.