#5166 File Manager upload fails without error message

[Jochen Demmer]

File Manager upload is not working. When I upload smaller files, no problem. A file e.g. with 8 MiB fails to upload.

After clicking upload the wheel spins and after half or full minute it stops and progress window disappears. The file has not been uploaded though.
There is no error message neither in Browser nor in miniserv.log/err

System FreeBSD 11.2
Webmin 1.881 installed via "pkg install webmin"

[Jamie Cameron]

How large does the file have to be for the upload to fail? Larger than the RAM on the system?

[Ilia Rostovtsev]

If you open browser's console (F12) will it show an errornet::ERR_ACCESS_DENIED.?

I also faced it recently in all themes.

[Timmy]

Is it a perl's problem?

[Jochen Demmer]

Hi,

@Jamie
I don't exactly know but the limit seems to be very low, 8 MB fails. The host has way more RAM than 8 MB.

@Ilia
When I hit F12 I find this error message:
http://mydomain.name/filemin/upload.cgi?path=&id=79058171641262830
413 Request Entity Too Large

For php I know how to set upload limits but this is perl / cgi, right?
When I change the user's UI Theme to the "old webmin" theme I get an obvious error message without having to invoke F12, saying:
413 Request Entitiy Too Large

So two questions arise:
a) How do I increase the limit
-> it is a problem of the reverse proxy (nginx). Please consider this closed. Maybe this ticket might at least help someone in the future. I had to set client_max_body_size to a decent value.
b) why does the modern UI not show the error?

[Timmy]

I can confirm that it is also a bug in Webmin version 1.890! Uploading file fails for small file size about 35MB!

The upload can never finish.

I am now using scp to upload my file but it is very slow when it is compared with webmin file manager!

[Jamie Cameron]

Is everyone who is seeing this accessing webmin via an Nginx reverse proxy? If so, I would recommend checking the proxy's upload size limit, as what appears to be what's being hit.

[Timmy]

I am on Ubuntu 16.04, Apache 2.4.18

[Ilia Rostovtsev]

No proxy.

It happens for me on Git version of Webmin. When you just copy/paste files from clonded directory to /usr/libexec/webmin, and having symbolic link poiting from /usr/local/bin/perl to /usr/bin/perl.

[Jamie Cameron]

Are others who are seeing this running webmin from the git repository?

[Ilia]

b) why does the modern UI not show the error?

This is not good and it's been fixed on the latest commit. Such upload errors from now on, will be shown in the UI.

[Ilia]

For those who is still having this kind of issue, look at:

1. ModSecurity
2. client_max_body_size (Nginx) or LimitRequestBody (Apache) option
3. SELinux policies.

[Ilia]

Providing more details.

For example, on Apache 2.4 and higher, if you want uploads of any size work and you have ModSecurity running, you would need to disable SecRequestBodyAccess, set LimitRequestBody to unlimited and tweak default body=20 of RequestReadTimeout directive to be unlimited as well.

It's better done inside of virtual host.

 LimitRequestBody 0
 RequestReadTimeout handshake=0 header=20-40,MinRate=500 body=0,MinRate=500
    <IfModule mod_security2.c>
        SecRequestBodyAccess Off
    </IfModule>

[Ilia]

For the future referene, I started Wiki page, where familiar questions will be clearly reflected and stored.

Besides, the theme, with new release, will dispay an error message with a link, when 413 error come up, to solve it in no time, because it might take significant amount of efort to figure things out.

https://github.com/authentic-theme/authentic-theme/wiki/Error:--413---Request-Entity-Too-Large