Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Server won't serve anything once .tcl libraries loaded at startup.

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24: Response to Server won't serve anything once .tcl libraries loaded at startup. (response to 1)
Posted by Richard Hamilton on 05/21/02 07:45 PM
OK, thank you everyone for your input. The advice given here eliminated most of the possibilities and as a result I have now resolved the issue. For anyone who is interested here is the reason for the strange behaviour:

As noted above I had used PostgreSQL version 7.2 and AOLserver version 33.13. I had compiled the postgres.so driver against these respective libraries, most notably pointing the driver makefile to libpq.so.2.2 instead of libpq.so.2.0.

The previous successful installation had been setup using PostgreSQL v7.1.3 which ships with libpq.so.2.1. Pointing the makefile to this library had worked fine.

I came to the conclusion that the preauth filters which are loaded at server startup time must be hitting the database and failing ahead of any page serve but there were no entries in the error log to indicate that postgres was returning no data. The server error log reported that the db connections were all working fine and that the driver was functioning normally.

The server access logs were correctly indicating the page requests but the browser was being sent no data. The only clue was an error in the lastvisit cookie process which reported an invalid token length for a data type. This looked like a data type definition fault which made me suspicious of the postgres.so driver.

I therefore compiled Postgres_7.1.3 and re-compiled the postgres.so driver against the 7.1.3 libraries. ACS WORKED.

It seems that one or more of the following statements is true:

Either

1) OpenACS_3.2.5 is not compatible at present with the latest version of PostgreSQL

and/ or,

2) The AOLserver driver version 2.0.1 for postgres is not compatible with PostgreSQL_7.2

and/or,

3) the library libpq.so.2.2 (that ships with PostgreSQL_7.2) is not backwardly compatible with libpq.so.2.0 and libpq.so.2.1 resulting in the need for a revised AOLserver driver beyond version 2.0.1

The bottom line is that for those considering upgrading to PostgreSQL_7.2 at the moment my advice is - don't. It cost me a month.

Thanks to everyone for your ideas and help - very much appreciated.

Regards
Richard