MySiteMaker FAQ

How do I find out what user the web server is running under?

Different distributions of Linux run the webserver under different users. Old, 6.x, RedHat distributions ran apache under the user 'nobody'. Debian runs apache under user 'www-data'. One way to find out is to use the 'ps' command with options set to display all processes (usually 'aux'). For example.

shell> ps aux

Why does MS-Excel report an error when I export data as MS-Excel?

Excel will report an error if the first column of data that it is importing is titled "ID". I don't really know why this is. The only work around is to re-name the column to anything other than "ID". For example, you could re-name the column to "id".

Submission Error and Internal Error messages...

When mySiteMaker runs into problems the typical error message that gets displayed in the web browser is a simple message that says "Submission Error". When you run into this sort of error, always keep in mind that more interesting error messages can be found in the web server's error logs. One of the best ways to view the errors in the error logs is to simply run the tail command on the error log. tail -f because you could see the errors get printed to the error log as they occur so you would also know exactly what button or link you just clicked on that created the error. For example:

shell> tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log

The table 'XXXXX' is full at mySiteMaker_db.pm line 162

This error comes up with versions of MySQL older than 3.23 when an in-memory temporary table becomes larger then a defined size. To fix this, you can upgrade MySQL or you can uncomment a line in the file "mySiteMaker_db.pm" (which can be found in the mySiteMaker CGIs directory). The line you want to uncomment is found in the "runMainQuery" subroutine. Simply remove the '#' from the beginning of the line:

$self->runQuery("SET SQL_BIG_TABLES=1");

The reason this line is commented out to begin with, is that it causes all temporary tables to be written to disk and can slow down database performance. See the MySQL documentation for more information: