I''ve been running a CWIS portal for several years, and a recent hardware failure has forced me to do an install from scratch. After an apparantly successful install of both 3.0.3 and 2.4.1 (verbose install mode showing no problems, nothing in error.log) I get what appears to be a blank page for the portal index.php.
I am running Debian (wheezy) with Apache/2.2.22, PHP/5.4.4-14 and MYSQL/5.5.38. php seems to be configured OK since the install page ran, and php info works fine. A quick look at the database gives no indication of a problem. I can't help but feel this is not an install problem but a server config problem and I'm out of ideas.
Any help would be greatly appreciated! -Mike Gallis
The actual index.php page serves the code below:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8" />
<title>Online Resource Portal - Home</title>
<!-- the css fixes depend on jQuery -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://scout.wisc.edu/interface/default/include/jQuery.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="https://scout.wisc.edu/include/SPT--jQueryPlugins.js"></script>
<!-- css -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="https://scout.wisc.edu/interface/default/include/CW-Theme.css" /><script type="text/javascript" src="https://scout.wisc.edu/interface/default/include/CW-Theme.js"></script><!--[if IE 7]><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="https://scout.wisc.edu/interface/default/include/CW-Theme-IE7.css" /><![endif]--> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="https://scout.wisc.edu/interface/default/include/CW-Generic.css" /><script type="text/javascript" src="https://scout.wisc.edu/interface/default/include/CW-Generic.js"></script>
solution: needed php-curl installed. Perhaps this could be added to the prerequisite list?
It shouldn't be necessary to install php-curl. I'm able to install and run CWIS on a server without php-curl installed. But, I do think I know what the problem was.
Our BrowserCapabilities plugin uses the php-browscap library for browser detection. This library in turn uses the browscap.org database, which has recently grown considerably in size. Unfortunately, php-browscap ends up being quite memory hungry during updates, and can cause memory exhaustion problems with this new larger database.
BrowserCapabilties configures php-browscap not to update its local copy of the database automatically, for a variety of reasons. However, it turns out that php-browscap will ignore that configuration and try to perform an update anyway when there is no local copy of the database. When this happens, it can cause memory exhaustion, and will output exactly the page contents you've supplied above. In this situation, each blank page loads a little bit more of the browscap.org database. Repeatedly reloading the page will eventually cause the database to be loaded completely, resolving the problem.
We've fixed this issue in the upcoming CWIS 3.1.0 release.
Could you try disabling php-curl and see if the blank pages recur?
I disabled curl, and the page was not blank... The system seems to be fully functional.
Curiously, the truncated page I was getting before was persistent (just showing the css calls in source) and wasn't showing errors, but when I loaded the page from the command line ( php index.html ) I saw the additional output suggesting a missing function was called (curl). I loaded curl, and the problem seemed to be completely resolved.
Let me just add that I had hardware failure + corrupted backups + hand me down hardware replacements in a one man show had me a bit agitated. I think I'll just superstitiously leave curl turned on.
-Mike Gallis