27 August 2009, 11:52

Hello,

I've installed Mahara and user registration doesn't work, system returns error messag

"Sorry, your registration attempt was unsuccessful. This is our fault, not yours. Please try again later."

I looked at the forum to see some advices and I saw the hint to look at error.log file on ftp root.

 The problem is also that I'm under shared hosting, i'm not able to access the server php.ini file. So how to creae error.log file? Where put what code?

Can anyone help me? thank you in advance!

27 August 2009, 18:41

Hi - normally on shared hosting, your control panel will give you access to part of the error log. Sadly, that's all you get though. It still might contain information about the problem. Best thing to do is to try and register, then immediately look in the log, as normally the control panel will only show you the last 30 lines.

By the way, that error is because sending e-mail failed. Your host might not allow you to do that, maybe. The error log will let you know. 

28 August 2009, 14:21

Hello,

Thank you for helping. I had to request error.log file at my hosting provider. When I read the file, I see a lot of :

 /home/www/e****1595643632f04a8c2b10ac418d1/web/favicon.ico
/home/log/httpd/error-20090828.log:[Fri Aug 28 11:50:05 2009] [error] [client ***.***.*.***] File does not exist: /home/www/e****1595643632f04a8c2b10ac418d1/web/robots.txt
/home/log/httpd/error-20090828.log:[Fri Aug 28 12:08:27 2009] [error] [client **.***.**.***] File does not exist: /home/www/e****1595643632f04a8c2b10ac418d1/web/event
/home/log/httpd/error-20090828.log:[Fri Aug 28 12:24:12 2009] [error] [client ***.***.*.***] File does not exist:

/home/www/e****1595643632f04a8c2b10ac418d1/web/component
/home/log/httpd/error-20090828.log:[Fri Aug 28 12:38:57 2009] [error] [client **.***.***.**] File does not exist: /home/www/e****1595643632f04a8c2b10ac418d1/web/component
/home/log/httpd/error-20090828.log:[Fri Aug 28 12:48:00 2009] [error] [client **.***.***.**] File does not exist:

 What do all those lines means? Does it means something for you?

About host emails, we are just migrating our site from Joomla! to Mahara, host wasn't blocking e-mails on joomla! architecture, but i'm not sure if joomla and mahare are using the same ways concerning this registration?

28 August 2009, 18:13

Hi - nope, those lines don't help unfortunately 

I'm not sure how Joomla sends e-mail, though Mahara sends it by using the php mail() function. It can send by smtp as well, if you copy the config variables from lib/config-defaults.php to config.php for SMTP and change them to suit you.

Actually, I think I can recall one reason why it might not work. We send all e-mail from noreply@[your website's domain]. I know that some e-mail servers won't send mail if the sender address is invalid. I have no idea why they do that, but it's just how they work. So if you set in config.php this line, maybe it will start working?:

$cfg->noreplyaddress = '[email protected]';

Make sure the address is a real one! 

29 August 2009, 12:24

Hi, thanks again for support.

Unfortunately it doesn't work .. I tried, but not any positive result.

Aw, how to get out of this? I admit I'm not an expert, even not a confirmed php user...

just to notice:

In /lib/config-defaults.php, missing ; at end of command
// $cfg->noreplyaddress = '[email protected]'

29 August 2009, 15:35

Also, adding a new user trough admin control panel works but I get an error message (failed to send welcome email to new user).

Hope it will help.

30 August 2009, 19:57

Hi - thanks for the note about the missing semi-colon, I have now fixed that.

Unfortunately all that message proves is that your system cannot send e-mail. It's very hard to tell exactly why this is the case though, unless the full error logs can be obtained rather than the abridged view your shared host is giving you. This is the main reason why we don't recommend you use shared hosting for Mahara by the way.

Sorry we weren't able to help more!  

01 September 2009, 13:35

http://users.skynet.be/fa667283/accro/[310809_17h-18h]error.log

Here above is the part of error.log concerning this monday between 5pm and 6pm.

I tried to register at around 5.41pm but maybe my computer time may slightly differ from my host time. 

Hope you'll find something useful..

01 September 2009, 19:06

It says there was an email exception, but the code is foolishly supressing exactly what it is.

Could you please apply this diff:

 http://paste.dollyfish.net.nz/f0822c

And try again, grabbing the log output again?

If you don't know much about diff, basically what you need to do is find, around line 388 in register.php, the line that says log_warn($e); and replace it with log_warn($e->getMessage()); .

04 September 2009, 13:33

Thank you,

I've done what u requested, here is the error.log after patching register.php. (Registration around 2.30PM).

 http://users.skynet.be/fa667283/accro/error-20090903.log