Troubleshooting
This section gives solutions to common Bugzilla installation
problems. If none of the section headings seems to match your
problem, read the general advice.
General Advice
If you can't get checksetup.pl to run to
completion, it normally explains what's wrong and how to fix it.
If you can't work it out, or if it's being uncommunicative, post
the errors in the
netscape.public.mozilla.webtools
newsgroup.
If you have made it all the way through
(Installation) and
(Configuration) but accessing the Bugzilla
URL doesn't work, the first thing to do is to check your webserver error
log. For Apache, this is often located at
/etc/logs/httpd/error_log. The error messages
you see may be self-explanatory enough to enable you to diagnose and
fix the problem. If not, see below for some commonly-encountered
errors. If that doesn't help, post the errors to the newsgroup.
The Apache webserver is not serving Bugzilla pages
After you have run checksetup.pl twice,
run testserver.pl http://yoursite.yourdomain/yoururl
to confirm that your webserver is configured properly for
Bugzilla.
bash$ ./testserver.pl http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip
TEST-OK Webserver is running under group id in $webservergroup.
TEST-OK Got ant picture.
TEST-OK Webserver is executing CGIs.
TEST-OK Webserver is preventing fetch of http://landfill.bugzilla.org/bugzilla-tip/localconfig.
I installed a Perl module, but
<filename>checksetup.pl</filename> claims it's not installed!
This could be caused by one of two things:
You have two versions of Perl on your machine. You are installing
modules into one, and Bugzilla is using the other. Rerun the CPAN
commands (or manual compile) using the full path to Perl from the
top of checksetup.pl. This will make sure you
are installing the modules in the right place.
The permissions on your library directories are set incorrectly.
They must, at the very least, be readable by the webserver user or
group. It is recommended that they be world readable.
Bundle::Bugzilla makes me upgrade to Perl 5.6.1
Try executing perl -MCPAN -e 'install CPAN'
and then continuing.
Certain older versions of the CPAN toolset were somewhat naive about
how to upgrade Perl modules. When a couple of modules got rolled into the
core Perl distribution for 5.6.1, CPAN thought that the best way to get
those modules up to date was to haul down the Perl distribution itself and
build it. Needless to say, this has caused headaches for just about
everybody. Upgrading to a newer version of CPAN with the
commandline above should fix things.
DBD::Sponge::db prepare failed
The following error message may appear due to a bug in DBD::mysql
(over which the Bugzilla team have no control):
To fix this, go to
<path-to-perl>/lib/DBD/sponge.pm
in your Perl installation and replace
{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'}) {
$numFields = $attribs->{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'};
} elsif ($attribs->{'NAME'}) {
$numFields = @{$attribs->{NAME}};
]]>
with
{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'}) {
$numFields = $attribs->{'NUM_OF_FIELDS'};
} elsif ($attribs->{'NAMES'}) {
$numFields = @{$attribs->{NAMES}};
]]>
(note the S added to NAME.)
cannot chdir(/var/spool/mqueue)
If you are installing Bugzilla on SuSE Linux, or some other
distributions with paranoid
security options, it is
possible that the checksetup.pl script may fail with the error:
This is because your /var/spool/mqueue
directory has a mode of drwx------.
Type chmod 755 /var/spool/mqueue
as root to fix this problem. This will allow any process running on your
machine the ability to read the
/var/spool/mqueue directory.
Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_NOINHERIT
This is caused by a bug in the version of
File::Temp that is distributed with perl
5.6.0. Many minor variations of this error have been reported:
Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_NOINHERIT, used
at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/File/Temp.pm line 208.
Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_EXLOCK, used
at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/File/Temp.pm line 210.
Your vendor has not defined Fcntl macro O_TEMPORARY, used
at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.6.0/File/Temp.pm line 233.
Numerous people have reported that upgrading to version 5.6.1
or higher solved the problem for them. A less involved fix is to apply
the following patch, which is also
available as a patch file.
Everybody is constantly being forced to relogin
The most-likely cause is that the cookiepath
parameter
is not set correctly in the Bugzilla configuration. You can change this (if
you're a Bugzilla administrator) from the editparams.cgi page via the web.
The value of the cookiepath parameter should be the actual directory
containing your Bugzilla installation, as seen by the end-user's
web browser. Leading and trailing slashes are mandatory. You can
also set the cookiepath to any directory which is a parent of the Bugzilla
directory (such as '/', the root directory). But you can't put something
that isn't at least a partial match or it won't work. What you're actually
doing is restricting the end-user's browser to sending the cookies back only
to that directory.
How do you know if you want your specific Bugzilla directory or the
whole site?
If you have only one Bugzilla running on the server, and you don't
mind having other applications on the same server with it being able to see
the cookies (you might be doing this on purpose if you have other things on
your site that share authentication with Bugzilla), then you'll want to have
the cookiepath set to "/", or to a sufficiently-high enough directory that
all of the involved apps can see the cookies.
Examples of urlbase/cookiepath pairs for sharing login cookies
urlbase is
cookiepath is /
urlbase is
but you have http://tools.mysite.tld/someotherapp/ which shares
authentication with your Bugzilla
cookiepath is /
On the other hand, if you have more than one Bugzilla running on the
server (some people do - we do on landfill) then you need to have the
cookiepath restricted enough so that the different Bugzillas don't
confuse their cookies with one another.
Examples of urlbase/cookiepath pairs to restrict the login cookie
urlbase is
cookiepath is /bugzilla-tip/
urlbase is
cookiepath is /bugzilla-2.16-branch/
If you had cookiepath set to /
at any point in the
past and need to set it to something more restrictive
(i.e. /bugzilla/
), you can safely do this without
requiring users to delete their Bugzilla-related cookies in their
browser (this is true starting with
Bugzilla 2.18 and Bugzilla 2.16.5).
Some users are constantly being forced to relogin
First, make sure cookies are enabled in the user's browser.
If that doesn't fix the problem, it may be that the user's ISP
implements a rotating proxy server. This causes the user's effective IP
address (the address which the Bugzilla server perceives him coming from)
to change periodically. Since Bugzilla cookies are tied to a specific IP
address, each time the effective address changes, the user will have to
log in again.
If you are using 2.18
, there is a
parameter called loginnetmask
, which you can use to set
the number of bits of the user's IP address to require to be matched when
authenticating the cookies. If you set this to something less than 32,
then the user will be given a checkbox for Restrict this login to
my IP address
on the login screen, which defaults to checked. If
they leave the box checked, Bugzilla will behave the same as it did
before, requiring an exact match on their IP address to remain logged in.
If they uncheck the box, then only the left side of their IP address (up
to the number of bits you specified in the parameter) has to match to
remain logged in.