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First post and an error when using File Manager

First post and an error when using File Manager

by Justin Sherrill -
Number of replies: 6

Hello Everyone

This is my first post to the forum.  We run multiple instances of WW, one instance per member College, and each instance lives on a dedicated VM.  We're running WW 2.15 on RHEL8 and users access the server through a F5 load balancer, though with one server per site we aren't actually doing any load balancing with it.  The F5 just takes care of public-facing SSL and IP. 

The setup has been stable for some time, but we recently started seeing an error when using the file manager.  I can click on File Manager without issue, but clicking on anything in the file list, whether directory or file, generates this error:

WeBWorK error

An error occured while processing your request. For help, please send mail to this site's webmaster, including all of the following information as well as what what you were doing when the error occured.

Wed Sep 21 08:46:23 2022

Warning messages

Error messages

Internal apreq error

Call stack

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

  • in Apache2::Request::upload called at line 252 of /opt/webwork/webwork2/lib/WeBWorK.pm
I get the same error clicking on any file/folder in the file list or any of the buttons on the right of the file list, even Refresh.  Have any of you run into an issue like this?  It's affecting all of our instances.

What's odd is we haven't changed anything recently that would explain the issue.  No OS updates, PERL module upgrades, or changes to the F5 configuration.  The only known change within the time period the problem started was the latest update to the OPL, but I've checked permissions and Apache should have access to those files.  I don't see any SELinux errors either. 

In reply to Justin Sherrill

Re: First post and an error when using File Manager

by Justin Sherrill -
We identified the issue. An auto-update scheduled for DNF upgraded our libapreq2 libapreq2-devel, libapreq2-libs and perl-libapreq2 modules from version 2.13.38 to v2.17-1. The 2.17-1 modules do not appear to be compatible with WW 2.15 and cause the error noted above. Reverting back to the earlier modules resolved the issue.

Not sure why the 2.17 modules aren't compatible.
In reply to Justin Sherrill

Re: First post and an error when using File Manager

by Casey Feskens -

We are having the same issue on RHEL7, but downgrade does not seem to be an option in the EPEL 7 repository...wondering where to go from here.

In reply to Casey Feskens

Re: First post and an error when using File Manager

by Justin Sherrill -

We located the RPMs for the earlier versions and installed locally.  If you have the RPMs on your local filesystem then you can run a yum downgrade command specifying the rpm names as parameters.  All four RPMs need to be downgraded as part of the same command or it'll fail on the dependency checks.

You can also add the module names in an exclude line to your yum.conf file if you want to prevent further updates to them (only do this after the downgrade).

In reply to Justin Sherrill

Re: First post and an error when using File Manager

by Danny Glin -
I found an EPEL mirror that keeps previous versions of packages: https://mirror.umd.edu/fedora/epel/

You can either make this your default mirror for the EPEL repo, or you can manually download the previous versions of the packages from there and then run the yum downgrade.  I downgraded to 2.16.1 and things are working for me in RHEL7.

Note that WeBWorK doesn't require libapreq2-devel to be installed.  You would only need this if you needed to compile something from source that depended on libapreq.  With that being said, if you have it installed it will need to be downgraded at the same time as the other packages as Justin mentioned.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: First post and an error when using File Manager

by Subasa Nguyen -

@Justin, Casey, Danny:

Thank you all for this. 

For those who also have the same issue and struggling to find the steps, here's what I did following the above suggestions / information:

0/ You can verify, if you want, what's installed with 
sudo yum --showduplicates list *libapreq2

1/ Download the 2.16-1-1.el7 package from https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=1747448
(I have 2 relevant packages libapreq2.x86_64 and perl-libapreq2.x86_64 so I downloaded those two)

2/ Downgrade using the two packages you just downloaded 
sudo rpm -Uvh --oldpackage libapreq2-2.16-1.el7.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh --oldpackage perl-libapreq2-2.16-1.el7.x86_64.rpm

Can verify with the same command sudo yum --showduplicates list *libapreq2

Hope that helps someone.

In reply to Subasa Nguyen

Re: First post and an error when using File Manager

by Danny Glin -

It's worth noting that version 2.18 of WeBWorK no longer uses Apache/mod_perl, and thus no longer needs Apache::Request.

Since 2.18 is built on Mojolicious it will be much easier to run on current linux distributions.