222902 - Bugzilla running on read-only filesystem

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Bugzilla :: Installation & Upgrading, enhancement)

Description

[John Williams]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030529

Hi,

Hope this isn't a FAQ / FRB, searched but no luck.

Our corporate webserver is configured such that the webspace filesystem is 
mounted as read-only by the physical webserver machine.  This has caused a few
challenges for me in installing buzgilla.  

Obvious candidates seem to be the preferences (I have to hand edit the params.pl
file), and the quips list, and a few others). Also tricky is that if I change a
template file, I have to re-run the .cgi from the command line (when mounted as
read/write), before anyone can access that page via the web, due to the JIT
template compilation process.

Anyway, these quirks I can live with, however users are reporting large numbers
of server errors - looking through the error logs there are things like failure
to create temp files in /data and so on.

Are there any guidelines available for running bugzilla on a read-only server? 
The stuff like the prefs etc might be well-suited to migrate into an SQL table
anyway, but I'm not going so far as to request that as a change!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated - please let me know if I can offer more
info - web server error logs can be made available on request.

Thanks,

John Williams

http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Connect to my server (see URL above)
2. Try a query, or enter a new bug
3. About 1 time in 5, the query page or new bug page will return an internal
server error.
Actual Results:  
Internal server werror reported, looknig at server logs it appears that failure
to create temp files is at least one culprit, but there are more as well.

Expected Results:  
served the page

Here are samples from the error log:

[Mon Oct 20 01:43:02 2003] [error] [client 81.57.80.70] Premature end of script
headers: localconfig.js, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 01:43:02 2003] [error] [client 81.57.80.70] failed to open log file,
referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 01:43:02 2003] [error] [client 81.57.80.70] fopen: Permission
denied, referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 01:43:03 2003] [error] [client 81.57.80.70] Premature end of script
headers: quicksearch.js, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 01:43:03 2003] [error] [client 81.57.80.70] failed to open log file,
referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 01:43:03 2003] [error] [client 81.57.80.70] fopen: Permission
denied, referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 10:16:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] Premature end of
script headers: localconfig.js, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 10:16:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] failed to open log
file, referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 10:16:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] fopen: Permission
denied, referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 10:16:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] Premature end of
script headers: quicksearch.js, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 10:16:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] failed to open log
file, referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 10:16:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] fopen: Permission
denied, referer: http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/index.cgi
[Mon Oct 20 10:18:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] Premature end of
script headers: query.cgi, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/query.cgi?GoAheadAndLogIn=1
[Mon Oct 20 10:18:54 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] Error in tempfile()
using data/versioncache.XXXXX: Could not create temp file
data/versioncache.lo5KP: Read-only file system at globals.pl line 521, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/query.cgi?GoAheadAndLogIn=1
[Mon Oct 20 10:19:09 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] malformed header from
script. Bad header=</pre>: reports.cgi, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/query.cgi?GoAheadAndLogIn=1
[Mon Oct 20 10:19:10 2003] [error] [client 130.102.64.96] [Mon Oct 20 10:19:09
2003] reports.cgi: Error in tempfile() using data/versioncache.XXXXX: Could not
create temp file data/versioncache.5rPXj: Read-only file system at globals.pl
line 521, referer:
http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~jwilliams/cgi-bin/bugzilla/query.cgi?GoAheadAndLogIn=1

Comment 1

[chaduv]

This would be mitigated quite a bit by being able to put the data/ dir on a rw 
filesystem. I'm not sure what the status of that is. Marking dependant on a 
configurable data/ location.

Obviously, if all filesystems on the webserver are readonly, this would not 
help.

Comment 2

[John Williams]

Apparently I can request a small read/write space on the server, so I'll go in
and hack bugzilla to expect the /data directory to be there.  We'll see how it goes.

Do you think in the longer term it would make sense to:

(1) migrate all persistent data stroage over to the database
(2) introduce a configuration parameter to specify where temp data should be written

?

Thanks,

John

Comment 3

[chaduv]

Take a look at the patch on bug 208604 for one stab at configuring where the
data/template/temp stuff goes. I can't really speak to moving all of the
persistent data into the DB - there are bugs requesting that specific bits and
pieces be moved in currently that I'm aware of.

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

It has been decided that we don't want to support this configuration.

Gerv