30-Oct-2017

PHP updates are a problem
Installed PHP 7.0 tonight and set things up.
The blogs show up once but on login, the site fails with a 502 error: Seems to be an IO error on PHPWASD (which is the PHP7.0 version of PHPWASD.EXE) but the problems seems to lay elsewhere, because the logfile states:
%HTTPD-W-NOTICED, 30-OCT-2017 20:56:35, CGI:2215, not a strict CGI response
-NOTICED-I-SERVICE, http://www.grootersnet.nl:80
-NOTICED-I-CLIENT, 82.161.236.244
-NOTICED-I-URI, GET (8 bytes) /Tracks/
-NOTICED-I-SCRIPT, /tracks/index.php tracks:[000000]index.php (phpwasd:) TRACKS:[000000]index.php
-NOTICED-I-CGI, 2544434C2D572D414354494D4147452C206572726F722061 (50 bytes) %DCL-W-ACTIMAGE, error activating image PHPWASDSHR
-NOTICED-I-RXTX, err:0/0 raw:330/0 net:330/0

Even after restarting WASD. After that, normal access is no problem, until login is attempted – and I get the same error: need to restart the server before I can access the site again….

I also tried 5.4 – which did work. But that is now failing also – from the beginning.

So back to 5.2-13, for now…
Later, I retried 5.4. It seemed to work, but posting an update to this post caused it to fail, for some reason. A second try didn’t, so the verdicht should be “unstable”. WATCH showed this error also:

215108 .72 DCL      5813 0003 DCL        WRITE CGIPLUSIN %X00000001
215108.72 DCL      5813 0003 DCL        WRITE CGIPLUSIN %X00000001
215108.72 DCL      5068 0003 DCL        READ SYS$OUTPUT %X00000001 158 bytes
53746174 75733A20 3530320D 0A536372 6970742D 436F6E74 726F6C3A 20582D65 Status 502..Script-Control X-e
72726F72 2D746578 743D2243 616E6E6F 74206163 63657373 20736372 6970742C rror-text=Cannot access script,
20692F6F 20657272 6F722E2E 220D0A53 63726970 742D436F 6E74726F 6C3A2058  io error....Script-Control X
2D657272 6F722D6D 6F64756C 653D2250 48505741 5344220D 0A536372 6970742D -error-module=PHPWASD..Script-
436F6E74 726F6C3A 20582D65 72726F72 2D6C696E 653D3133 34390D0A 0D0A     Control X-error-line=1349....
215108.72 CGI      2326 0003 CGI        RESPONSE header line 1 'Status 502' 11 bytes
215108.72 CGI      2326 0003 CGI        RESPONSE header line 2 'Script-Control X-error-text=Cannot access script, io error..' 64 bytes
215108.72 CGI      2326 0003 CGI        RESPONSE header line 3 'Script-Control X-error-module=PHPWASD' 40 bytes
215108.72 CGI      2326 0003 CGI        RESPONSE header line 4 'Script-Control X-error-line=1349' 33 bytes
215108.72 CGI      2588 0003 CGI        RESPONSE stream mode
215108.72 ERROR    1122 0003 RESPONSE   PHPWASD1349 (basic-only) 502(502) Cannot access script, io error..
215108.72 DCL      5921 0003 DCL        WRITE HTTP$INPUT 181 bytes

But nothing of this was shown on screen – it all looked fine on the screen. Perhaps it’s just in the administration panels…

29-Oct-2017

All blogs on MariaDB
Tonight I installed the latest version of MariaDB that has been published on OpenVMS (5.5.58) and moved all blogs to that version. Or stated otherwise: phased out MySQL 5.1.43, that served me well for several years. Since my requests have been included (ask what port to be used – not 3306 since yoy may have multiple database engines running…) this went fine: Copy the MYSQL databases to MariaDB and convert them. It meant I needed to redo the changes I did on the Trips, Tracks and Travels blog but since these are minor, it was not much of a problem. Added a new entry as well.
So far, it seems that this blog is faster than the other, but time will tell about the full performance.
If all runs well for some time, the next step is to update PHP – preferably to the latest version (7.0.24) that has been set up – but not yet activated.

23-Oct-2017

MariaDB active
Tonight I started MariaDB and had it ‘active’ for at least 15 minutes – longer than the previous version could stay alive. But nothing happened, so I did some SQL work, that would cause the server to die before. But it stayed on.
So I changed access for the Trips, Tracks and Travels blog to use MariaDB – there was no change in that blog after I moved it to MariaDB. had to do some updates but they al seemed Ok. (Changed the Admin password, for a change :)).

For now, it looks fine; Time will tell, but if everything is going as it should, this blog will be the next – which will require moving the whole MySQL database again, but now I know that the process works, it should not be a problem. Except that the blogs will be unavailable for an hour or so.

Stay tuned….

22-Oct-2017

MariaDB test
After my last test – of which I passed the results to Mark Berryman – a new version has been released last week. I downloaded it as soon as I could, tonight I installed it and ran the upgrade that failed. This time, it succeeded, but the following step: creating SSL certificates – failed on a the heavier one. Nevertheless, the database _should_ work so I started MaraiDB and have it run – doing nothing, but it should stay alive.

If that runs, next step is testing it with WordPress, to start with. If that’s Ok, I’ll head on with PHP upgrades. Perhaps take the big step and have 7.0 running, it should work, because that’s the recommendation of WordPress.org…

To be continued…

18-Oct-2017

Blog problems
A few days ago I noticed that neither blog was accessible: I got non-CGI-conformant reponses which caused WASD to signal an error. As it turned out, this was caused by different errors that occurred out-of-the-blue on the 6th of October:

%HTTPD-W-NOTICED, 06-OCT-2017 06:01:44, CGI:2215, not a strict CGI response
-NOTICED-I-SERVICE, http://www.grootersnet.nl:80
-NOTICED-I-CLIENT, 8.29.198.27
-NOTICED-I-URI, GET (19 bytes) /sysblog/?feed=atom
-NOTICED-I-SCRIPT, /sysblog/index.php sysblog:[000000]index.php (phpwasd:) SYSBLOG:[000000]index.php
-NOTICED-I-CGI, 2553595354454D2D462D53544B4F56462C20737461636B20 (66 bytes) %SYSTEM-F-STKOVF, stack overflow, PC=FFFFFFFF80C3B42C, PS=0000001B
-NOTICED-I-RXTX, err:0/0 raw:286/0 net:286/0

and occasionally

%HTTPD-W-NOTICED, 06-OCT-2017 13:04:30, CGI:2215, not a strict CGI response
-NOTICED-I-SERVICE, http://www.grootersnet.nl:80
-NOTICED-I-CLIENT, 164.132.161.58
-NOTICED-I-URI, GET (20 bytes) /sysblog/?m=20080721
-NOTICED-I-SCRIPT, /sysblog/index.php sysblog:[000000]index.php (phpwasd:) SYSBLOG:[000000]index.php
-NOTICED-I-CGI, 2553595354454D2D462D41434356494F2C20616363657373 (118 bytes) %SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, access violation, reason mask=00, virtual address=000000003B706870, PC=FFFFFFFF80C3B42C, PS=0000001B
-NOTICED-I-RXTX, err:0/0 raw:188/0 net:188/0

It made no difference whether I restarted the server, of MySQL (since that causes time-outs in PHP 5.4 causing similar problems here).
Unaware of any change in the environment, I consulted Mark Daniel but even he couldn’t locate something…

However, tried again today with WATCH enabled, i DID get a response I could work with: accessing SYSBLOG not just gave me the output I was familiar with, but also a clue on what may have been the cause: WAS was able to capture the output of the PHP engine before it was overwritten (?) by the error (that also showed up) which is returned to the browser – causing the Server error (and hence, non-conformant response). And that lead to the memory blink: I renamed one of the files in the WordPress environment, assuming it was one of those blog-specific files. It isn’t….

So I revered that error – and the blogs are accessible again.

This is the WATCH result that suddenly showed the case: When accessing this blog, once the stack trace was found. The Trips, Tracks and Travels blog, accessed a few minutes later, shows just the result; without the warning – and this is what I normally would see when WATCHing this.