Problems installing Vanilla

thewoolleyman

Hi, I'm trying to migrate an existing installation of Vanilla to a new server, but I'm having problems. All I get on the index page is a blank page. If I run through install.php, I get to the point of typing in my DB info, but I get a blank page after I submit that form too. Here's the relevant info: * Apache2 + PHP5 + Debian Sarge + MySql 5.0.19 * PHP seems OK, because: * a test page with phpinfo() shows fine. * If I put a bogus agAPPLICATION_PATH in settings.php, I get some PHP error output as expected * I've turned up php error logging as far as I know how, but there is nothing in the apache error log. PHP is indeed logging errors to the apache error log, because if I force an error in a page it shows up in the log. How can I debug this? Is there any way I can get an error message with some clue at to what is wrong? Thanks, Chad thewoolleyman AT gmail DOT com

Mark

I think you might get your answer over here... http://lussumo.com/community/discussion/2057/after-input-database-option-the-page-is-donebut-nothing-show/

Minisweeper

too quick big boy

thewoolleyman

Ok, it took me 2 days to figure this out so I'm sharing it. The root problem was with the "old_passwords" setting in mysql. I use Ruby on Rails against this same MySql, which requires that you DO NOT use old passwords. PHP (at least the latest libs available on debian) require that you DO use old passwords. Figuring this out was made much more difficult by the fact that the PHP Vanilla app provided ABSOLUTELY NO ERROR MESSAGES, not even when I cranked up PHP logging in php.ini to the max. None, zilch, just a blank page. So, to fix it, I just did this from the mysql root user: set password for userid@localhost = OLD_PASSWORD('password'); You don't even have to set the old_password flag back on in my.cnf, the user that you are logging in from php just has to have it's password stored in the old format. Personally, I think that it's pretty lame that there were no error messages printed for this. Isn't this an oversight in the Vanilla code??? Thanks for the responses, Chad

Minisweeper

All default php error messages in vanilla are silenced by using the @ prefix for the function name in order to prevent ugly default php error messages from being displayed to the screen during normal use of the forum. For debugging purposes it's easy enough just to remove the @'s so you can check out what the errors are. Vanilla does this because for the majority of error messages which would occur it has its own error management function which shows the errors in a much more user friendly format (and hopefully more helpful, atleast to novices). If there are errors which the error collector misses and you can pin them down, i'm sure mark would be willing (perhaps) to add an error collection function at that point to pick them up if necessary.

Mark

I've always had a hard time with this bug in particular. Don't quote me on this, but I'm 90% sure that this issue actually cases php to stop being parsed altogether. I remember it happening when I set up a server, and I tried to get PHP to do *anything* and report *some* kind of error, but it just wouldn't. I removed all @ symbols and everything - but nothing would make it chug on. I just tried to revert the password in my dev mysql5 db so that I could test this, but it doesn't seem to be throwing any errors despite using old style passwords. This one definitely has me stumped. In other news, just yesterday I improved the database related error reporting so that it gives more descriptive messages when reporting db related errors. I don't think it will help with *this* issue, but it will definitely help with other db related issues. If anyone has any more information about the effects of this old_password stuff and how to get proper error messages when it occurs, I'd love to hear about it.

Bergamot

Yeah, I had this bug on the last server I installed, though I had no idea what was causing it. Vanilla and ALP blank-screened; PHPmyAdmin worked, oddly enough. Ended up just nuking the whole damn thing and installing XAMPP, which I came to regret for other reasons.

lech

Would it be worth it to have vanilla spit out concise errors into it's own log?

Mark

I'll say again: I'm 90% sure that this issue actually cases php to stop being parsed altogether

In other words: there is nothing I could have done in the vanilla code to report errors of any kind. It would hit the error and the PHP parser would shut down. No more code is touched, so no errors get reported.

Minisweeper

An error log for other stuff might be useful, though...