UsingWW: Installation fails at Course Administration

Following some excellent advice from yesterday, I'm following the instructions at

http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Installation_Manual_for_2.7_on_Ubuntu_12.04

to install WeBWork locally. And it was going swimmingly until I got to the "Create the admin Course" section. When I clicked on "Course Administration", I got lots of errors, such as:

Call stack

The information below can help locate the source of the problem.

in Exception::Class::Base::throw called at line 811 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/DB/Schema/NewSQL/Std.pm
in WeBWorK::DB::Schema::NewSQL::Std::handle_error called at line 412 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/DB/Schema/NewSQL/Std.pm
in WeBWorK::DB::Schema::NewSQL::Std::_get_fields_where_prepex called at line 380 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/DB/Schema/NewSQL/Std.pm
in WeBWorK::DB::Schema::NewSQL::Std::get_fields_where called at line 480 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/DB.pm
in WeBWorK::DB::listUsers called at line 251 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator/Login.pm
in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::Login::body called at line 152 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/Template.pm
in WeBWorK::Template::template called at line 509 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator.pm
in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::content called at line 200 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK/ContentGenerator.pm
in WeBWorK::ContentGenerator::go called at line 370 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK.pm

I'm quite mystified by all of this, since as far as I know I've done everything correctly so far. But clearly I haven't... Any advice?

Thanks!

Re: Installation fails at Course Administration

by Alasdair McAndrew - Thursday, 7 November 2013, 1:06 AM

I've got a little further; now my attempts produce:

Directory permission errors

unable to write to directory /opt/webwork/webwork2/logs
unable to write to directory /opt/webwork/webwork2/tmp
unable to write to directory /opt/webwork/webwork2/DATA

The webwork server must be able to write to these directories. Please correct the permssion errors.

I've got several users all going at once: me, wwadmin, and root. I'm not quite sure what permissions should be for all the directories in /opt/webwork, and which user is accessing them when I enter the webwork site either with localhost/webwork2, or with the full servername: myserver.myuni.edu.au/webwork2 If it's just a matter of setting the permissions it should be easy to correct. So far they have the permissions

drwxrwsr-x

and are in the group, and owned by, wwadmin. I'm still confused by all this!

Re: Installation fails at Course Administration

by Alasdair McAndrew - Thursday, 7 November 2013, 1:28 AM

Got it sorted! I just went back and repeated some of the permissions steps again, and restarted apache. Seems to be working now. Phew!

Re: Installation fails at Course Administration

by Michael Gage - Friday, 8 November 2013, 8:49 AM

What did you do to resolve this error? We may be able to provide a better error message at this stage, but first I need to know what caused it. It's clearly a database error, but it doesn't appear to one of the usual "cannot connect to mysql" or "field does not exist" errors. Possibly the users hadn't been loaded into the admin course yet?

Thanks.

Mike