Question

Hi,

I am getting strange behaviour on my TWiki installation:

I wanted to configure parts of the site before I moved on to authentication and .htaccess settings, so I ran a few spotchecks.

I can seemingly edit a lot of pages without incident, and they do get logged, but when I access the sitewide prefs page, I get a

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

/twiki/data/TWiki/TWikiPreferences.txt is not writable

Go back in your browser and save your changes locally."

After clicking OK, and refresh, I do get the changes I entered on the page, but no diff.

I had trouble setting up the user with the "system" user, so I created a new user and added this one to the admins as a local user, and have apache and cygwin using it.

Is the above due to a lack of authentication or is it a genuine issue ?

I can't seem to grab the latest Testenv from http://svn.twiki.org:8181/svn/twiki/trunk/bin/testenv so I am enclosing the local testenv file which shipped with my TWiki20040902 kit. I've had to change IP-addresses and servername, bar that, the file is unedited.

Grateful for any help.

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 20 Jan 2005

Answer

Oh - Forgot: Both the twiki and the cygwin folder are writeable by the twiki-user. I saw someone else posted something similar on jan 10th, but it was closed - if this is a known issue with a known fix, maybe you could give us both a pointer, I've been doing searches in the answered files and on RCS but I didn't quite see the issue reported there

Thanks again

-- TWikiGuest - 20 Jan 2005

First verify that it is the .txt file which is not writable and not the .txt,v file.

Usually when the edit is saved but the diff is not it means that the lock owner, recorded in the ,v file, is incorrect. Quick test: a) rename or delete the ,v file (rename if you need to keep the history, delete it if you don't care). b) Make an edit and save. If both the edit and diff are kept that was your problem.

From testenv there is a "relock rcs" files script which automatically changes the lock owner in all webs (but not in attachments). Note that it has a bug which means that certain topics will have the revision attributed to the wrong author. See RelockingRCSFiles for more info. The manual method specified in the TWikiInstallationGuide does not have this problem.

If it isn't a lock owner issue you're back to looking at permissions again. Look at AnotherInsecureDirectory and see if that looks similar to you.

As for not being able to get the latest testenv, try removing :8181 from the url, your firewall may be blocking that port.

-- MattWilkie - 20 Jan 2005

Hi Matt

Thanks for your help

I've actually never been able to run the relock rcs thang from the testenv page, this goes for both Opera and MSIE and on both Linux and Windows

I did as you suggested in regard to the ,v file - after having opened it in PFE to take a look at the contents, it does show it's locked to the user twiki.

Doing this manually would mean the syntax for doing this would be $ perl -pi~~~ -e 'NR <= 10 && s/twiki:/twiki:/ ' /,v

?

I added the user "everyone" to the cygwin and twiki folders to no avail, I still get the error.

-- TWikiGuest - 20 Jan 2005

I just finished a manual relock with the syntax described above - no avail, the error message remains.

-- TWikiGuest - 20 Jan 2005

It doesn't sound like RCS locks are the problem then. Perhaps try 1) from the filesystem rename TWikiPreferences.txt (and txt,v) to something else, 2) From twiki create a new TWikiPrefences topic, 3) copy the contents the old prefs topic, 4) save.

-- MattWilkie - 20 Jan 2005

No use.

I just did a quick, clean install, rebooted, followed the cookbook by the book, added the system user to the cygwin and twiki folders as well and now I get the same error all over.

Thing is, I thought it'd be a quickie fix, ad I am supposed to sho management the versatility and usefulness of TWiki tomorrow morning

-- TWikiGuest - 20 Jan 2005

A total reinstall on a windows 2003 server still didnt bring me any further.

I can set up new webs just fine, I can change them and add files, but no diff file is generated. The Sandbox and new web fail silently. The new pages in the sandbox show a log, but not the pages in the sandbox itself - a change there is on a line 1 to 1 level. I can add attachments just fine.

When I ran a diff in the MAIN web in cygwin, I got this, I am not sure this is relevant, but:

$ diff /,v /,v~ diff: extra operand `MAIN/WebIndex.txt,v' diff: Try `diff --help' for more information.

Could someone point my nose to RCSLite ? I think I may give that a shot...

thx again

-- TWikiGuest - 21 Jan 2005

RCSLite is a simple edit to TWiki.cfg away. To enable uncomment the following around line 205:

#$storeTopicImpl = "RcsLite"

-- MattWilkie - 21 Jan 2005

Thanks ever so much for the help I rolled back to the initial install - I decided it was better with one frelled up page than all of them

Do you think ppl would be interested in a cookbook despite this issue ?

Thanks again

-- TWikiGuest - 21 Jan 2005

Our ppl or your ppl? I don't understand the question. In any case the surest way to test for interest is to write a mock up and see what the response is.

-- MattWilkie - 22 Jan 2005

• testenv.htm: testenv file