Installation

Hardcopy generates for admin, but not students

Hardcopy generates for admin, but not students

by Jeremy McFarland -
Number of replies: 3
Hey guys,

I've followed the 2.8 install directions for Ubuntu 12.04lts from a fresh install four times, just to be sure. I have www-data in my wwdata group, as well as wwadmin. No errors in the apache error logs, and nothing in tmp directories.

I can generate a hardcopy as admin in the admin interface, but as a student it doesn't process anything. It just states: 'WeBWorK was unable to generate a paper copy of this homework set. Please inform your instructor'. No other errors are reported. The .pdf generated from the admin ui doesn't seem to have a problem and generates without issue.

When I generate for an admin it places the .pdf in the htdocs/tmp/course/hardcopy/ directory and returns it to the browser:

-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data wwdata 88158 Feb 16 15:57 TEST.admin.Functions.pdf

wwadmin@ubuntu:/opt/webwork/webwork2/htdocs/tmp/TEST/hardcopy$

www-data seems to have no problem writing there, www-data owns that entire course directory. It only seems to fail on students, and it's immediate. There is no processing time, so it's failing at execution. I want to believe it's probably a permission issue, but I'm not seeing it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated,

-Jeremy
In reply to Jeremy McFarland

Re: Hardcopy generates for admin, but not students

by Jeremy McFarland -
I decided to just stick with 2.7 for now. Not sure what in the 2.8 install I was doing wrong. LiveCD works fine as long as I don't upgrade.
In reply to Jeremy McFarland

Re: Hardcopy generates for admin, but not students

by Michael Gage -
I'd bet on the permission problem as well.  Probably on the permissions, ownership of the tmp directory -- but i could easily be wrong about that.

Several things to try.  

Create a course other than admin for testing this -- the admin "course" is always somewhat special and not a good place to do debugging.

Print hardcopy as a professor in this new course -- student error messages are sometimes truncated somewhat to spare them the details.

tell you how to preserve files so that you can execute the commands from the command line in order to have more control while trouble shooting. 

Using 

sudo su  webserver   (or whatever the user name of the webserver is)

before executing commands allows you to act as the webserver, just in case you have permissions that the webserver does not.

-- Mike



In reply to Michael Gage

Re: Hardcopy generates for admin, but not students

by Jeremy McFarland -
Thanks for the reply Mike.

I'm pretty sure something got set wrong during my installation. I was able to upgrade to 2.8 without issues by installing the Vanilla LiveDVD w/2.7, completely deleting the 2.7 webwork directory and database, then following:

http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Installation_Manual_for_2.8_on_Ubuntu_12.04

Everything works as it should, including CAPA and the other extra problems.

Thanks again! Sorry to waste your time!

-Jeremy