23 June 2009, 6:30

   I have a new Mahara site (English and Spanish) but  I'm stuck. I hope that someone can get me out of my problem.  
    I found what another Mahara user wrote as a perfect description of my problem so I repeat it:

“The 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 continually says "uploading file" and it never finishes!”

   Here's the steps I followed and where I am at.
 
 First,  I reported to my webhost support team what Nigel had written in response.


A reply :
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



  The support people reproduced the problem : logged in, went to MyPortfolio/MyFiles/Upload a File, check copyright notice and they discovered it was true: it keeps working at uploading but even the smallest upload never works.

   Incidently, my site is able to receive and hold on to blog messages. That part IS working.   

  They eventually had someone write back with this advice:

 I have carefully investigated the issue and indeed it doesn't seems that the upload function would be overloading the server or is reaching any kind of limit.

What seems to be the problem is that your website doesn't make a call to the server for the upload function at all. What the site uses is an AJAX call to get the folder content and upload the file.  Inspecting it using FireFox and FireBug plugin shows that the AJAX request to list the folder files/directories completes successfully but no request to upload the file has been made.

I have also checked the server for any errors, but I'm afraid I wasn't able to locate any, thus I can assume the problem is within the script itself rather than a server related issue. I can recommend you to get in touch with mahara developers and ask them for further details what might be causing the problems. The three possible problems listed in your initial reply are not the cause (or at least it doesn't seems so) in your case:

* The files you're uploading are too big - most servers default to a 2MB limit (unlikely)

The file is way below the upload max filesize

* Your server has some kind of limitation, e.g. on exec() being called

There is no such limitation. You can see that here in my test.php file I have just created. It executes the ls command perfectly:

http://missiodei.com/test.php

* /usr/bin/file isn't installed on your server

The /usr/bin/file is present on the server as you can see below:

root@site238:/home/missiod1/public_html# which file
/usr/bin/file
root@site238:/home/missiod1/public_html#

Please let us know what the developers of the script recommends and what else they think might be causing the issue.

  I am not all that tech savvy, but by following the steps I did, I hope someone in the Mahara Community can step up and point out what the problem is.  I would appreciate it very much.

Thomas Soerens

23 June 2009, 18:15

Hiya - thanks for getting in touch, and for the detailed list of steps you've taken so far!

Where abouts is your site? I can log in and take a poke around for you. And what version of Mahara are you using? Since Mahara 1.1.0, the /usr/bin/file command is not needed, although it seems like the problem you're having is before not having it would cause a problem anyway.

27 June 2009, 0:18

Hi, I've now logged in and looked around. I found that you had the 'Virus Checking' option set, but hadn't specified a path to clam. Unticking the box made everything work again.

We should probably improve this in future, as it's not the most intuitive behaviour! I'll file a bug about it.