Installation Troubleshooting

What to do if the installation goes wrong...

[Tip]Tip

DON'T PANIC!

The first thing to do is to try and remember where it started to fail - the Back key on your web browser should be able to help here if you were using wacssetup. The following steps should help you find out what worked and what didn't...

Checking Database And Accounts

MySQL5

Open up a terminal window on the server and try the following (but using whatever username/password you actually gave wacssetup ):

% mysql -u wacs -p wacs

and enter your password at the prompt. If it replies with:

ERROR 1044 (42000): Access denied for user 'wacs'@'localhost' to database 'wacs'

it is fairly safe to assume that the user account and database did not in fact get created.

Oracle 10 and Oracle 11

Open up a terminal window on the server and try the following (but using whatever username/password you actually gave wacssetup ):

% sqlplus
SQL*Plus: Release 11.1.0.6.0 - Production on Wed Nov 18 14:58:32 2009

Copyright (c) 1982, 2007, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

Enter user-name: wacs
Enter password: 
ERROR:
ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied

it is fairly safe to assume that the user account and database did not in fact get created.

Checking Structures

If the first group of actions that wacssetup takes seem to have gone OK, and then the next step where it creates the schema starts to show problems, then we need to check if anything got created. This particular step is where problems with the server IP address configuration often show themselves, particularly when using MySQL as it is the first time that we try to use our Wacs system credentials in earnest. Please see the section called “Preparation Tasks” for more information on this. A sure sign of this failure will be an error message something like this:

DBI connect('wacs:www.example.com','wacs',...) failed: Access denied for
 user 'wacs'@'myserver.example.com' (using password: YES) at wacssetup
 vendpop line xxx
Can't connect to database
Reason given was Access denied for user 'wacs'@'myserver.example.com'
 (using password: YES)

Verifying Schema

Anyway, if you're seeing this kind of message, you need to verify if the database schemas did indeed get created or not. To do this, we log into SQL with the Wacs user account details as follows (change account names and passwords as appropriate):

% mysql -u wacs -p wacs
Enter password:
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 316
Server version: 5.0.84 Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current
 input statement.

mysql> describe conn;
+-----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| Field     | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra |
+-----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
| centryno  | int(9)       | NO   | PRI | NULL    |       | 
| cgroup    | int(6)       | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| corder    | int(3)       | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| cflag     | char(1)      | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| cstatus   | char(1)      | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| cmodelno  | int(6)       | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| csetno    | int(9)       | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| cphotog   | varchar(6)   | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| ctype     | varchar(20)  | NO   |     | NULL    |       | 
| cdesc     | varchar(80)  | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| ccomments | varchar(240) | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| cpath     | varchar(160) | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| cadded    | date         | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
| camended  | date         | YES  |     | NULL    |       | 
+-----------+--------------+------+-----+---------+-------+
14 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit
%
[Note]Note

The SQL commands used, describe and quit are identical for Oracle although the formatting and output will differ slightly.

If you instead get a message like: ERROR 1146 (42S02): Table 'wacs.conn' doesn't exist then that is confirmation that the schema create phase had failed. Once you've resolved the cause (most likely these hostname issues), you have two choices:

  • remove the existing half built structures and run wacssetup again (see below)
  • complete the database creation manually picking up the manual install instructions from the appropriate point.

Cleaning Out Half-Created User Accounts

If you choose to do the former option above (restart), you will need to remove the existing user account and database area as follows:

MySQL version - replace wacs and myserver.example.com as appropriate. The second drop user step may fail - that's not a problem. Be very careful indeed you have the right database name for step four!

% mysql -u root -p
Enter password:
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is xxx
Server version: 5.0.84 Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

mysql> drop user 'wacs'@'localhost';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> drop user 'wacs'@'myserver';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> drop user 'wacs'@'myserver.example.com';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> drop database wacs;
Query OK, 10 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> commit;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit
Bye
%

You should then be able to re-run the wacssetup web application (once of course you've worked on the root cause of the failure - most likely the IP address/DNS name issues).

Beyond That

Once you've got beyond the user account, database area and database schema creation steps, there is really only the initial data population left to be done. For this it's simplest to just follow the last steps of the the section called “Manual Database Creation Steps” process from the step the section called “3. Create default database contents (optional)”.

wacssetup completes but you can't login

If the wacssetup completes normally but you fail to to login when you're sure you're using the right username and password, there's a couple of things to try. run /usr/bin/pam_auth (packaged installations) or /usr/local/bin/pam_auth (easyinstall/manual installations) - give it your username and password, separated by a space, and then press <ENTER>. If it replies with OK all is well; if it replies with ERR or some other error message (and you know you typed your password right of course) then there's a problem.

Most likely it's in /etc/pam.d and to do with the file called wacs there. Compare it to other files in the same directory like sshd and squid (if present) for the correct dialect for this platform. The security sub-directory of the Wacs source tarball contains various versions written over the years, one of which may be in the correct PAM dialect.

If All Else Fails

The next step is probably to follow the manual creation instructions at this point and see how they progress. If those fail, please visit our web sites - sourceforge site or launchpad site or use our mailing lists or email address to get help.

[Tip]Tip

Do take a look through the checklist below the section called “General Troubleshooting Tips” as there may be tips there that help and at the very least having gone through these will help us get to the root cause of your problem quicker.