System Administrator's Guide Zelerate: AllCommerce
Appendix E: Troubleshooting
This appendix gives you tips on how to handle some of the most frequently encountered installation problems. See www.zelerate.org for documentation updates.

Common Installation Problems
Most installation problems have to do with improper configuration of store.pm and httpd.conf.
  • Be sure that the host and domain values set in store.pm coincide with what is listed in /etc/hosts and your VirtualHost declaration in httpd.conf. If you used www.presents.com as an example for the sample store installation, then storedomain should be .presents.com and storeserver should be www.
  • Make sure that your VirtualHost declaration has www.presents.com in the beginning of the declaration:
  • Make sure that ServerName is also www.presents.com within your VirtualHost declaration.
  • For /etc/hosts, if you are just testing on a local installation, you need to put "www.presents.com" on the same line as your localhost.localdomain name. For example:
    127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain www.presents.com

Cannot Access Your Web Store
This common problem occurs often with people who have more than one httpd.conf file on their computer. This could happen if Apache was already installed unknown to the user who installs it again via a download from www.apache.com. If you are certain you have all the values set and everything configured correctly, but you are still getting odd denial of access errors when you point your browser to your newly installed store, try doing a locate for httpd.conf:
               locate httpd.conf 
            
If you get a list of more than one, possibly in /etc/httpd/conf and /usr/local/apache/conf, then you need to find out which one your web server is reading when it starts up.

One way to find out which httpd.conf file your web server is reading is to stop your web server, change the name of both httpd.conf files, and then restart Apache. This will show you which file it was trying to read when it fails to start and gives error messages about not finding httpd.conf.

Restarting the Server After Editing httpd.conf
This may seem trivial, but it seems to happen often and can be the cause of much frustration and wasted time. Simply using the apachtl restart or httpd stop, httpd start commands may not really stop all processes. These steps will ensure that your changes to httpd.conf have taken effect:

Make sure that all processes have stopped by using the kill command:
               killall httpd.conf 
            
Next do a : pstree before restarting the server.

Error Logs
Often, web server problems can be ferreted out by examining the error logs that are generated by the server. As an example, Apache's error logs can usually be found in /usr/local/apache/logs. Within this directory are logs for the web server itself; these usually list errors in starting the server or in its configuration. You can also find logs specific to each host (virtual if more than one) that your web server handles. These are usually more informative for finding AllCommerce installation or configuration errors.

Where to Get Help
You can join the mailing lists at http://lists.zelerate.org/mailman/listinfo. The devel (development) and docs (documentation) lists are best for asking questions. You can post a problem or question and it will usually be answered by another user or by a member of the development or documentation teams.

Database Problems
Most postinstallation database problems have to do with improper configuration of the values in database.conf. Such errors can usually be discovered by examining the server logs for your site. The most common errors involve a bad name given for the site_server, but all of the database.conf values are equally important to allow AllCommerce scripts to successfully interact with your database.
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