Blank error on archive update

[fredriley]

Me again, I'm afraid . I've managed to get a working Harvester installation up at http://www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk/harvester2/ and that will be the default end-user search interface for our learning object repository. Up to now, when I've logged in as admin and gone into Manage Archive to update the harvested index, I just needed to click on Update Metadata Index and it did what it said on the button - updated the index from the last time it was updated. The From date was always the last update date, and Until was empty.

When I tried it yesterday and again today, with From and Until as above, Update Metadata Index generated the empty error:

The metadata index could not be updated. The following error(s) occurred:

below which there's nothing. Looking in the HTML source, it reads:

<p>The metadata index could not be updated. The following error(s) occurred:</p>
<ul>
<li><span class="formError"></span></li>
</ul>

The only way I can force the 'update' is to put a long ago date into From and today's date into Until, when of course it then reharvests all records, which is time-consuming. What's causing the empty error, can anyone tell me? More importantly, how can I fix it? As far as I know there hasn't been any config change to the repository software on the server, though I don't know for sure as I'm not the server admin. I've not made any config changes to the Harvester admin setup. What concerns me is that, eventually, we're going to automate harvesting via a scheduled job to run the update via the command line, and if this blank error occurs we many never know it's happening and our archive will go increasingly out of date.

TIA for any tips/suggestions.

Fred

[asmecher]

Hi Fred,

Could you try harvesting from the command line with the "verbose" option? Usually this kind of failure is caused by an XML parsing error, i.e. an archive is serving up invalid XML that PHP is unable to parse.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[fredriley]

Hi Fred,

Could you try harvesting from the command line with the "verbose" option? Usually this kind of failure is caused by an XML parsing error, i.e. an archive is serving up invalid XML that PHP is unable to parse.

Thanks for the reply, Alec. I can't get to the command line on the repository server, I'm afraid - it's a Windoze box and I can't get shell access to it. As a comparison, I've run an archive update on a test Harvester2 installation on a Macbook running OS/X at home and got the same error as before, which indicates a repository error as you suggest. So I tried running harvest.php list off the command line in a terminal window and got:

internal:~/Sites/localhost/harvester-2.0.1 fredriley$ php tools/harvest.php list
<h1>DB Error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)</h1>Harvester2: DB Error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

The mySQL server was running as Harvester was working from the web interface, and as it was nearly 10pm I was in no mood to debug mySQL and OS/X so I gave in and poured myself a beer. Nothing's ever simple, is it? Other than pouring the beer, that is... :*)

Cheers

Fred