[kforge-user] Installation and setup experiences + problems

Wed Feb 21 09:01:35 UTC 2007

Thanks for your replies and for considering my suggestions..!

> > a Visitor should not have access to project services. This restriction
> > works fine for svn, but not for trac. Is this a known problem? (I'm
> > running kforge 0.12 stable).    This also leads to the next point..
>
> Could you be a bit more specific here. Do you want (a) visitor to have
> no read or write access or (b) just no write access.
>
> If (a) this should work if you do not have visitor as a member of the
> project. If (b) then this is a known problem which arose in the latest
> release (did not exist in the previous one) and we are working on a
> satisfactory fix.

I'm looking for (a). I've noted some additional things: Projects in
your demo site, for example
http://demo.kforgeproject.com/project/abc123/, are by default closed
for visitors. When you try to access the svn or trac services you get
the usual pop-up dialog prompt for accessing the restricted area.
However, when I try to access a svn service on my installation I
instead get redirected to KForge login page saying "You'll need to log
in before you can access this area". When I log in I'm redirected to
the svn service. This is really cool, but is it the expected behavior?
Since you don't have it on your demo site.  Also, this does not work
for the trac service. I can access it without logging in, and I enter
the trac as a visitor with read-write permissions.

Now, the weird thing: all the above goes for testing with firefox or
IE. When I try it from home, using safari on Mac OS X, it works just
fine - pops up a user/passwd prompt as expected! This leads me to
below there's something weird with my apache configuration. We're
running a pretty recent version, 2.2.3.

In addition, after running the server for a while, this error starts
to occur more frequently:

Exception Type:     KforgeRegistryKeyError
Exception Value:    "No Person called 'visitor' found: (2006, 'MySQL
server has gone away')"
Exception Location:
/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/kforge/accesscontrol.py in
isAccessAuthorised, line 9

After restarting apache all is good for a while, then it starts again.
Other services relying on MySQL, like our homepage, is still working
without a glitch though.

All this weird behvaior leads me to believe there's something not
perfectly well with our installation. After all, it's an old RHEL
(version 3, I believe), and we have configured and compiled everything
from source. We also picked the latest versions available when
compiling, such as apache 2.2.3, python 2.5, etc.. It's a bit safer
relying on pre-compiled packages, but that's impossible with our old
RHEL. It's been rock stable (uptime of 307 days :-)  but maybe it's
about time to let it go..

So what I will do, is installing and trying out kforge on a fresh
fedora installation in VMWare and see if I get the same behavior.

> > == SVN checkout ==
> >
.....
> > [Sat Feb 17 19:39:23 2007] [error] [client ] (9)Bad file descriptor:
> > Could not open password file: (null)
> >
> > Any thoughts?
>
> I have got nothing to add to John's comment (other than to check that
> you are logging when using svn co using the same username as on kforge
> and not the username you have your local machine).

Yes, I explicitly used --username to be sure, without success.

I'll try again on a fresh installation and see if I get the same problems.

Cheers,
Gunnar

>
> In any case the fact that you are getting a 500 error rather than 401 or
> similar is something we should try to investigate (the problem these
> kind of errors are so hard to track and write unittests for ...)
>
> > Sorry for the lengthy mail, but I like your system, and would really
> > like to see it work for me  :-)
>
> No problem, and thanks for taking the time to write.
>
> ~rufus
>