Problem installing Harvester2 and a harvesting question

[tinawina]

I am running into the 500 Server Error right after installing Harvester2. I have tried fixes posted in this forum. Nothing worked. Here's where things stand. Appreciate your help!

I downloaded and installed Harvester2 on my server and got the nicely formatted installation page. The first step of the configuration went fine. I tried to let the installer create my harvester2 database (called something different on my server since our hosting company prefixes our databases with our account username) but it couldn't do it -- I expected that as we typically have to create databases from within our hosting account control panel.

I did note that everything was chmod-ed properly according to the installer and there were no problems except the need for me to use the manual method to create my database and tables. I clicked the "manual" button and received the second installation page with database table SQL directives. I used that to create my tables in my new database (and I reflected the correct database name in the initial install screen). With that done, I clicked on the "login" link as instructed on page 2 of the installation and I get a "500 Server Error". I can't go back to the installation page or get anywhere else. The only way to get back to the installation page is to completely uninstall the software from our server, and then do a clean install from the .tar file.

I've been reading through posts that pertain to the 500 Server Error and checked for things that were mentioned in those. For instance, our magic_quotes_runtime is set to "Off" -- which is suggested in one post (though magic_quotes_gpc is set to "On" -- which I'm checking on now but believe we need for our website which is using a PHP framework). Our memory_limit is set to "40M", well over the suggested 12M to 16M minimum suggested in one post re: this error. One thing I'm wondering about - we are installing Harvester2 in a subdomain. Would this cause any problems?

We are running Linux, Apache, PHP 5.2.5, and MySQL 5.0.4.5. Here's a link to our phpinfo() file: http://issuelab.org/info.php. Appreciate any help with this! Harvester2 looks like it's exactly what we need!

That brings me to my second question. We are an operating archive of nonprofit research. We've got about 840 pieces of research already stored in our MySQL database. Our entire operation is about letting nonprofits list their own research with us (through our registration and add/edit routines) that is then repurposed in a variety of ways -- website, newsletters, RSS news feeds (including feeds incorporated into external sites). In other words, we are not concerned with letting people submit to us via our Harvester2 installation; we just want to use it to let others harvest our data. The database I created for Harvester2 is separate from the one where we house all of our research listings that we want harvested. Please forgive my ignorance! I'm very new to OAI-PMH and providing data via harvester. Is this set-up -- the harvester in one database, the data to be harvested in another -- a problem? I hope this makes sense. Just not real clear about what happens next for us as a data provider. Oh - but we did do our research and are using Dublin Core!

Thanks so much for any help you can offer! We are excited to become a data provider!

[tinawina]

Ok - I believe the magic quotes = on was the problem. I just reinstalled everything after changing my php.ini file so that magic_quotes_gpc = off. Ran thru the installation and I'm looking at the PKP interface for searching, etc. now.

Hmmmm, now I have to figure out what to do next.

Hope this helps someone else.