Question

I'm getting a Topic Save Error when I try to save an edit, and the error message says that the ci cant find a revision number.

During save of file Main.WebHome an error was found by the version control system. Please notify your TWiki administrator.

/usr/pubsw/bin/ci -q -l -m'none' -t-none -k '/afs/ir.stanford.edu/users/s/o/somik/public/twiki/data/Main/WebHome.txt' 2>&1
ci: /afs/ir.stanford.edu/users/s/o/somik/public/twiki/data/Main/WebHome.txt: can't find a revision number

This happened after a modification to TWiki.cfg by my sys admin. I do not have root access, and I was earlier getting the error:

/usr/pubsw/bin/ci -q -l -m'none' -t-none -w'somik.cgi   
 '/afs/ir.stanford.edu/group/hsc/twiki/data/Sandbox/WebHome.txt' 2>&1
 ci: no password entry for userid 8973
 ci aborted

As the webserver does not use local user account, my admin changed -w"login" to -k. That solved the password entry problem, but now I'm stuck with the revision number problem.

If you'd like to test, try: http://cgi.stanford.edu/~somik/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Any help is much appreciated.

Environment

-- SomikRaha - 02 Jan 2005

Answer

I have exactly the same environment and the same problem (changing TWiki.cfg's ciCmd entry from -w to -k resolves the password entry problem but now results in a "can't find a revision number" problem). This just started happening all of a sudden on Jan 3 after 4 months of uneventful operations...Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

-- SreeniIyer - 05 Jan 2005

http://cgi.stanford.edu/~somik/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/testenv can't identify the apache user name the cgi's are being run under. If testenv can't, the rest of twiki won't be able to either. The sysadmin changing the checkin so no author name is required just changed the symptom, not the problem.

You could probably skip the error messages, and keep saving revisions, by hardcoding a name in TWiki.cfg with -w$cmdQuoteyour_servername$CmdQuote however all revisions will then have the same author. (I think).

Your problems probably run deeper still though. From looking at your site, I see that you are using PattenSkin, however the css files are not being loaded. If they are accessed directly there is a permissions error. SUEXEC should not be trying to execute these files to begin with.

In my opinion you need to back up and reinstall from the beginning, paying attention to directory layout. For example twiki should not be under cgi-bin like it is now. More like:

~/somik/twiki/lib
~/somik/twiki/data
~/somik/twiki/pub
~/somik/twiki/templates

this is covered in the installation docs for non-root accounts (admittedly a scary bunch of topics to look at. TWiki has the ironic problem of too much documentation. :))

Search twiki.org for topics dealing with SUEXEC for more installation and troubleshooting help.

-- MattWilkie - 05 Jan 2005

TWiki data and templates directories are not in cgi-bin. I've had to put the lib and bin directories inside cgi-bin, as well as pub. The reason is that, the hostnames for the apache server and cgi are different. So, while I have www.stanford.edu/~somik/twiki/.. for serving static content, I'd need to use http://cgi.stanford.edu/~somik/... for executing the perl scripts.

Thats why I decided to put all web related stuff under cgi-bin.

I've solved the suexec problem by manually copying the css files to a visible location and modifying the template.

Hardcoding a name actually worked, but as you said, I wouldn't get the name of the actual user. I can live with that for now till I find the real solution.

Thanks!

-- SomikRaha - 25 Jan 2005

On the "no password entry for userid" issue see SaveTWikiPreferenceFile.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 Mar 2005