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Oops: can't login in: "Page not found"

Oops: can't login in: "Page not found"

by Alasdair McAndrew -
Number of replies: 5
I've clearly done something stupid, because I can't access my own WeBWorK installation; attempts to go to the site simply produce an error: "Oops! That page can’t be found."

I've been fiddling a lot with my wordpress installation recently, and it's just possible (actually it's more than "just possible", it's "very likely") that I made a change somewhere that has affected my WeBWorK installation.

This is somewhat alarming, as I need to access student results so I can collate them with exam results and submit them. So I have two questions:
  1. How might I go about trying to fix the site and make it visible to the webserver (apache, running on Ubuntu 14.04) again?
  2. If I can't do that, then how can I access the student results? In what file or files in which directory can I find them?

Thanks for this,

Alasdair

In reply to Alasdair McAndrew

Re: Oops: can't login in: "Page not found"

by Danny Glin -
If I understand correctly, the web server is running, and it's just the WeBWorK pages (/webwork2/...) that are inaccessible?

If this is the case, then the first thing to check is that your apache configuration is still including the webwork.apache2.4-config file.  If your system was set up according to the typical installation instructions, there should be a symbolic link in the /etc/apache2/conf-enabled directory to this file, possibly called webwork.conf.  If you don't see a webwork file in this directory, it explains why WeBWorK isn't found by the system.  It can be recreated by following the second instruction at http://webwork.maa.org/wiki/Installation_Manual_for_2.10_on_Ubuntu_14.04#Configuring_Apache

For your second question, the student results are stored in the database.  You would need to look in the [coursename]_problem_user table, where there will be an entry for each student for each problem.  The status column represents the student's grade for that problem.  If you need to extract the data this way, it's going to take a few mysql queries to get it into a form that would be useful to you.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: Oops: can't login in: "Page not found"

by Alasdair McAndrew -
Thanks, Danny, for your reply.

Well, in my /etc/apache2/conf-enabled directory there is the file webwork.conf which is a symlink to /opt/webwork/webwork2/conf/webwork.apache2.4-config

And in my /opt/webwork/webwork2/conf/site.conf file I have set $server_root_url = "http://numbersandshapes.net" which should be OK.

I checked the settings on the link and they're all fine. As far as I can tell everything is as it should be... except that it doesn't work!

The URL http://numbersandshapes.net/webwork2_files/ gives me the WeBWorK placeholder page, but the URL http://numbersandshapes.net/webwork2 gives "Oops! That page can’t be found."

I'll continue to take any suggestions on board!

Thanks,
Alasdair
In reply to Alasdair McAndrew

Re: Oops: can't login in: "Page not found"

by Michael Gage -
Take a look in the apache error log when you try to connect to see if there is some useful error message (such as the connection is being routed to the wrong directory).

Make sure you reboot your server between changes. :-)

When you reboot the server you should see a number of messages from WeBWorK -- the url of webwork, various other constants associated with the site. These can alert you if you have configured one of the basic paths incorrectly but they also show that webwork is really starting up.  
In reply to Alasdair McAndrew

Re: Oops: can't login in: "Page not found"

by Davide Cervone -
The "Oops! That page can't be found" is generated by wordpress, so it looks like you have configured your copy of wordpress to use the main site address (http://numbersandshapes.net) to be the wordpress address, and that means it is going to handle ALL the URLs to your site, including http://numbersandshapes.net/webwork2. That means that WeBWorK's handler is never triggered. You may need to make your wordpress address be to an address further down, like http://numbersandshapes.net/wp/ or something like that.

I'm not sure why the webwork2_files address is not being handled by wordpress. I'm wondering if that directive in the apache configuration is being processed before the wordpress one, and if you could change the order to put wordpress last. I'm not familiar enough with wordpress to tell you exactly what to do, but it might be something to look into.
In reply to Davide Cervone

Re: Oops: can't login in: "Page not found"

by Alasdair McAndrew -
That sounds like the sort of thing! - I'll have an ask around on the wordpress forums and see what advice they can give me.

It's a right pain, though...

STOP PRESS! Solved it - it's the wordpress permalinks which break it. When I changed the links from http://numbersandshapes.net/?p=123 to http://numbersandshapes.net/2015/11/sample-post/ then webwork was hidden by wordpress.

Many thanks,

Alasdair