Settings and Marketplace not working

Hi,

I am using PIWIK 2.8.3 with PHP version 5.3.3-7+squeeze22.

When I click on “Settings” (more precisely, this URL: …/piwik/index.php?module=UsersManager&action=userSettings&idSite=1&period=day&date=today), only a blank page is shown. (This happens on Chrome; when I use IE, a HTTP 500 error is shown.)

I am not good with PHP, but I traced the problem back to a function “getMenu()”. It is called at several places, for example in “setBasicVariablesAdminView” of ControllerAdmin.php, and anytime it is called, the program gets caught in some kind of infinity loop and never gets back.

I was not able to find the implementation of that function (or rather I found many implementations and couldn’t figure out the right one), so my debugging process stopped here.

Any suggestions?

Thanks and best regards

Lukas

PS. The “Marketplace” doesn’t work either showing the same symptoms. Didn’t try to debug here so far.

Hi Lukas,

can you try re-upload all files ?

If you still get the error please post the full error message available ?

Hi Matt,

thanks for the answer!

I have already tried re-uploading the whole system - didn’t change anything.

I don’t have an error message - where can I find it? Didn’t find a log file and also nothing in the database…

pleas ask your sysadmin or host to look into your server error log file, as there was 500 http error you should get a message logged there?

Ok, I looked into it. The errorlog does not seem to have anything relevant (just me, misspelling my password :wink: ):

[Tue Oct 28 13:07:45 2014] [error] [client 198.27.70.] File does not exist: /home/ws/aifb-web-0008/info2.aifb.kit.edu/htdocs/wp/beispiel-seite
[Tue Oct 28 13:19:25 2014] [error] [client 198.27.70.
] File does not exist: /home/ws/aifb-web-0008/info2.aifb.kit.edu/htdocs/wp/beispiel-seite
[Tue Oct 28 15:30:51 2014] [error] [client 141.3.194.] user aifb-web-0008: authentication failure for “/global-cgi-bin/myerrorlog”: Password Mismatch
[Tue Oct 28 15:31:15 2014] [error] [client 141.3.194.
] user aifb-web-0008: authentication failure for “/global-cgi-bin/myerrorlog”: Password Mismatch
[Tue Oct 28 15:31:27 2014] [error] [client 141.3.194.*] user aifb-web-0008: authentication failure for “/global-cgi-bin/myerrorlog”: Password Mismatch

The accesslog shows these entries when I try to access the properties page (or maybe just the last one… I’m not sure):

141.3.194.* - aifb-web-0008 [28/Oct/2014:15:40:48 +0100] “GET /global-cgi-bin/myaccesslog HTTP/1.1” 200 25171 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.104 Safari/537.36” TLSv1 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA
141.3.194.* - aifb-web-0008 [28/Oct/2014:15:40:50 +0100] “GET /global-cgi-bin/myaccesslog HTTP/1.1” 200 25178 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.104 Safari/537.36” TLSv1 DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA
129.13.198.* - - [28/Oct/2014:15:41:03 +0100] “GET /server-status HTTP/1.0” 200 2679 “-” "BIG-IP/11.1.0"
129.13.198.* - - [28/Oct/2014:15:41:33 +0100] “GET /server-status HTTP/1.0” 200 2680 “-” "BIG-IP/11.1.0"
129.13.198.* - - [28/Oct/2014:15:42:03 +0100] “GET /server-status HTTP/1.0” 200 2679 “-” "BIG-IP/11.1.0"
141.3.194.* - - [28/Oct/2014:15:42:08 +0100] “GET /piwik/index.php?module=UsersManager&action=userSettings&idSite=1&period=day&date=today HTTP/1.1” 500 412 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.104 Safari/537.36”

Does this help at all?

Thanks a lot for your support!

Lukas

I solved it. It was a plugin causing the problem. When I removed it, all worked fine!

Thanks, Matt, for the hint of checking the log files - another log file contained the following message:

[28-Oct-2014 14:44:27] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘[’ in
/home/hard/sccfs-web/aifb-web-0008/info2.aifb.kit.edu/htdocs/piwik/pl
ugins/LdapVisitorInfo/LdapVisitorInfo.php on line 43

Which was the vital clue :slight_smile:

Thank you SO MUCH lukaskoenig, I just had the same problem after an update.

I didn’t have any clue since I do not have access to all the logs from my webhost, but indeed I didn’t think about plugins I downloaded in the past (and didn’t even activate!), and since I could not access the Settings page, I just deleted everything inside the plugins/ folder and then reuploaded the plugins/ folder inside a fresh vanilla piwik.zip archive.

And it worked! I now have access back to my settings page and everything runs smoothly.

This is ridiculous, of course, the first problem source of any extensible application are the plugins, and this is the first place to tinkle with when something goes wrong.

However, this was written nowhere in the documentation. I really think the developpers should add this advice (to backup the plugins/ folder somewhere else, wipe it up, and reupload a standard plugins/ folder from a piwik.zip archive) to the FAQ here:

http://piwik.org/faq/troubleshooting/faq_148/

What’s important to note is that plugins can produce a blank settings page even when disabled!

Another thing: it should be noted in the same FAQ entry I cited that most often, blank pages are produced because servers can’t show error messages. It could be advised to enable PHP errors in order to better diagnose those issues.

Hi there,

Another thing: it should be noted in the same FAQ entry I cited that most often, blank pages are produced because servers can’t show error messages. It could be advised to enable PHP errors in order to better diagnose those issues.

Thanks for the tip, the FAQ was updated at: http://piwik.org/faq/troubleshooting/faq_148/