MachForm Community Forums » MachForm 3

1. uiltexas
   Member

   I'm having this, what appears to be common, issue. It just started today and is affecting all of my forms, all of which use the standard view.php method.

   It seems to appear only when review form is enabled. When I disable that, the forms submit, but kick the user directly back to a blank form, which is only slightly less bad.

   One example:

   https://www.uiltexas.org/machform/view.php?id=32886

   The most obvious possible change came yesterday, after discovering that my data folder was open to the Web, I had my sysadmin look at the permissions and ownerships on it so we could move it to an inaccessible location. We had some form directories in the apache group, and some in www. She changed all of them to www. I have not yet changed settings for the data directory.

   I also requested a DNS change yesterday but it was to redirect an entirely separate domain to the current domain. It is possible the network support guy fiddled with something in the main DNS records, but I don't have any specific reason to think so.

   Other than that, I can't think of any changes, and these have all been working fine for years.

   I've submitted a support ticket, but we're relying on several forms over the weekend, so I want to try every avenue for a quick solution.

   Thanks for any help.

   Posted 11 years ago #

2. Saghalie
   Pro Member

   Your data folder should be set to 755 (or 777). See the installation instructions at appnitro.com.

   When I tried the form that you supplied, it was super fast - so I'm not sure what you actually need. Normally if you have a session expired issue, that means that for some reason your server is not responding - check your error logs on the HTML server (apache?) and see if you can resolve the issue with your provider.

   Regards,

   Saghalie
   http://www.kcmhosting.com

   Posted 11 years ago #

3. uiltexas
   Member

   Saghalie,

   I did notice some browser-inconsistency, Chrome seemed unaffected by the problem -- is that what you used 2 day ago?

   However, the issue seems fully resolved now, although I'm still waiting to hear from my system administrators to see if we know why. I do feel more confident that it was related to php session variables though.

   Last night I learned that another non-Machform form system on our server was returning errors that had a occurred a few years ago as a result of session variables getting mixed on a load-balancing server. Last night I was unable to set and retrieve session variables on those forms, but I'm able to do it this morning.

   All that to say, my best guess is that it was indeed session related, but I don't yet have a clear answer as to how it got fixed.

   Posted 11 years ago #

4. Saghalie
   Pro Member

   It does sound like a server issue though. Not sure what could be the problem though. Your administrators should be able to figure it out by reviewing the logs.

   Regards,

   Saghalie
   http://www.kcmhosting.com

   Posted 11 years ago #

5. uiltexas
   Member

   Not 100% sure, but pretty sure we found it.

   Low disk space in /var was preventing php from writing session files in /var/lib/php/session

   And this was indirectly a result of my attempt to move machform/data/ to a secure location in /var/private. I had copied the data up there, which filled up the disk.

   My report yesterday of it working was temporary and it stopped working again shortly after. We're guessing some purge temporarily freed up space for a while. I've now cleared out some of our larger file directories and my sysadmin added some space, so hopefully that's the end of it.

   Thanks for your help.

   Posted 11 years ago #

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