[BlueOnyx:21730] Re: Unable to add vsite after update

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Chris, hi Brian,

> I've just tried " yum -y update && shutdown -r now" and it 
> changed nothing as I'm still getting the same error message.

The error "cantEditVhost" has been around for years and I think we've
all sporadically seen it at one point or another.

About a week or ten days ago I had a box that was persistently throwing
it and was able to troubleshoot it to some degree by turning on
debugging in the handlers and restarting CCEd until it went away on its
own. Since then I've been unable to recreate the failure conditions for
a more thorough debugging.

When you create a Vsite via GUI, CMU or "cceclient", then CCE executes
the command "create Vsite". This triggers various handlers which perform
the related steps of Vsite creation.

The first handler that needs to run is base/vsite/vsite_create.pl. That
checks which siteX-number is free, creates the skeleton directories of
the Vsite and creates the separate 'VirtualHost' object.

Once that handler has run, additional handlers run that deal with
reserving email aliases, creating the <VirtualHost>-container for
Apache, sorting FTP and mailing-lists and what not.

The error "cantEditVhost" happens when base/apache/virtual_host.pl runs
before base/vsite/vsite_create.pl has run.

So it's essentially a timing issue where something
(base/apache/virtual_host.pl) is run earlier than it should have.

CCEd has three stages for handler runs:

- CONFIGURE
- EXECUTE
- CLEANUP

Anything that's supposed to run in the "CONFIGURE" stage runs before
anything from the "EXECUTE" stage and the "EXECUTE" stage happens before
the "CLEANUP" stage. This allows us to get some order and structure into
what should run when. There is more to this, as some stages are limited
to what actions may be performed by a handler, but I'll leave it at that.

Still: If two handlers are in the same stage (and these two are), then
it can arbitrarily happen that one runs before the other. Like in this case.

Here is a little band-aid that you can try until I have figured out a
more permanent solution:

Edit the following two files:

/usr/sausalito/base/vsite/vsite_create.pl
/usr/sausalito/base/apache/virtual_host.pl

Somewhere near the top you will find ...

$DEBUG = "0";

... in both. Change the "0" to "1" in both and save the changes. Then
restart CCEd:

/usr/sausalito/sbin/cced.init restart

Run a "tail -f /var/log/messages" and then in the GUI hit "Save" to try
to create the Vsite again. Chances are: It'll now work and in
/var/log/messages you'll be able to see that base/vsite/vsite_create.pl
runs before base/apache/virtual_host.pl does.

If debugging is enabled, then the "correct" handler wins the execution
lottery like clockwork.

I'll try to move base/apache/virtual_host.pl to the EXECUTE stage again
(which isn't ideal for other reasons) and if that doesn't work I might
have to tweak the events in the CONFIGURE stage a bit to force a later
execution of base/apache/virtual_host.pl in another fashion.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber