[Coursework-help] Re: Two problems with our 2.5 installation

[Ian B. <ie...@tf...>]

Ray,

This could be a complete red herring. But when we first used the 2.5 
system it had the capability to manage fail over on the Oracle 
connections. ie 2 backends.  When the first connection fails it switches 
to the backup. Once or twice our developers left the connections in 
oracle.properties to the Stanford Oracle server. The result was that all 
of a sudden we would loose all sessions, and the course content and 
logins would change as if by magic. It even appeared to switch JDBC 
drivers mid flow. We changed passwords and urls on the connections in 
the Postgres version to ensure that it didn't happen.

However, I dont know quite what would happen, if a connection was 
switched to failover and the failover connection failed. It could 
account for the behaviour you are seeing. ( The "unable to relogin until 
server is restarted" looks like a symptom of this. )

Have a look in oracle.properties and if there are any references to 
other servers.

Its probably also worth removing any references to Stanford servers in 
the other config files. We will check the code in CVS to fix this.

HTH
Ian

BTW,
I've cc'd in the help list for the Postgres version.
Daisy, sorry, this problem may have been caused by the port.



Ray Davis wrote:

> We've installed the 2.5 / PostgreSQL kit from Sourceforge for 
> evaluation. I'm stymied by two big problems:
> 
> 1) As an administrator, I can create assignments and they preview 
> correctly. When I switch to the student view, or when I log in as a 
> student, and click on the assignment link, e.g.:
> 
>   
> /coursework/servlet/Assignments?action=assignment&course=5360&assignment=5001&key=1838421524 
> 
> 
> I get a popup window warning me about the 60 minute time limit, but the 
> main browser window is blank. A "View Source" shows only an empty HTML 
> document. I don't find any error messages in the log files. I've put 
> some more debug-level logging into 
> "coursework_postgres/src/Announcements.java" myself, but so far nothing 
> odd seems to be happening.
> 
> 2) When the software tries to connect to an unavailable service, all 
> users lose their sessions and are unable to log in again until the 
> servers are restarted. (This is my tentative understanding of what's 
> happening, anyway.)
> 
> We were first able to reproduce this by selecting the "Admin Print 
> Reserve" link:
> 
>   /coursework/servlet/AdminPrintReserve?action=process
> 
> Not surprisingly, since it still pointed to Stanford's system, this 
> returned a 500 error, and the following message was in the error log:
> 
>   DEBUG [Thread-20] (AdminPrintReserve.java) - problem process Library 
> ReserveConnection refused. Check that the hostname and port are correct 
> and that the postmaster is accepting TCP/IP connections.
> 
> The surprising part was that authentication stopped working. And, as 
> with the first problem, no relevant errors or warnings were being logged.
> 
> Given the inconvenience, I commented out that line in 
> "dtl/admin/nexus/adminsite.dtl". However, we're still occasionally 
> bumping into the same symptoms, although I haven't been able to track 
> down the new trigger.
> 
> Has anyone else had similar issues and solved them?
> 
> Thanks,
> Ray
> ========================
> Ray Davis, Web Services
> Educational Technology Services
> University of California, Berkeley
> 
> Phone: 510-642-8581
> 
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