Internal server error 500

[fredriley]

Hi, it's your favourite (cough!) user again, with another interesting bug/error. After trying and failing to install Harvester in my account on our university multi-user system, which was due to system restrictions rather than Harvester, then installing it on a standalone PC where it worked fine but our sysadmins wouldn't allow external HTTP requests to go through to it, I decided to try installing it on a personal hosting account I have with a provider called Titan Internet. The hosting account runs on Red Hat Linux server, and AFAIK there are no proxy or port restrictions. I was able to install Harvester fine - it checked all the permissions were ok, checked the mySQL setup, then gave me an installation confirmation page. When I tried to access Harvester, though, at http://www.fredriley.org.uk/harvester2/, I got an "Internal server error 500", which in my experience is due to the scripts doing something strange that Apache doesn't like. The same with http://www.fredriley.org.uk/harvester2/index.php/login. If I went directly to http://www.fredriley.org.uk/harvester2/ ... /index.php I got a PHP error "Fatal error: Call to undefined function import() in /home/fredriley/htdocs/harvester2/pages/login/index.php on line 18".

So, I contacted the hosting company and asked them to send me the relevant lines from the error log, which I've copied below. I did have a quick search for "500" on this forum but the only topic that referred to it was viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1985&p=6535&hilit=500#p6535 which isn't much help as it requires the user to be able to edit the php.ini file, which I certainly can't do.

Any ideas? I'm pretty sure that I've set all the permissions correctly. The whole installation is 755, other than the required writeable directories which are 777. The server is running PHP 5 - see http://www.fredriley.org.uk/harvester2/phpinfo.php - and mySQL 5 (I think).

One day I'll manage to get it running on a public server, though I'm beginning to think that I'm going to need a standalone Linux box with a direct Internet connection and full admin rights...

Cheers

Fred

----------------------

Error log (relevant excerpts):

[Thu Oct 25 12:01:15 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.42] File does not exist: /home/fredriley/htdocs/favicon.ico
[Thu Oct 25 12:03:06 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.42] Premature end of script headers: php, referer: http://www.fredriley.org.uk/harvester2/ ... ll/install
[Thu Oct 25 12:03:45 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.42] Premature end of script headers: php
[Thu Oct 25 12:04:01 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.42] File does not exist: /home/fredriley/htdocs/harvester2/install.php
[Thu Oct 25 12:10:34 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.22] PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function import() in /home/fredriley/htdocs/harvester2/pages/install/index.php on line 18
[Thu Oct 25 12:10:51 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.22] Premature end of script headers: php
[Thu Oct 25 12:16:39 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.22] Premature end of script headers: php
[Thu Oct 25 12:16:44 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.22] Premature end of script headers: php
[Thu Oct 25 12:17:59 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.22] Premature end of script headers: php
[Thu Oct 25 12:29:04 2007] [error] [client 128.243.220.22] Premature end of script headers: php
[Thu Oct 25 12:34:11 2007] [error] [client 87.127.235.50] Premature end of script headers: php

[fredriley]

As a postscript to the above, I've finally managed to get Harvester installed, on a Windows server of all things, and working fine - see http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk/harvester2/ - so it's not critical to solve the above problem, which you might want to see as a bug report.

On a tangent, I'd suggest as a feature for the archive management interface some kind of progress indicator for when the application is harvesting a big record set. Maybe a page refresh after every, say, 50 records are harvested so that the user knows that something's going on, as some might think that the browser's just hung. That's a pretty minor thing, though.

Thanks as always for your perseverance with the previous 'issue'.

Cheers

Fred

[asmecher]

Hi Fred,

A progress indicator is absolutely on the horizon, not only to show the user where progress is, but also to keep the connection between client and server alive (which on some servers means that harvesting will continue when it would otherwise stop).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team