Manual talk:Running MediaWiki on FreeBSD

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I'm trying to install the latest stable version on a FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7 machine. I've run "chmod a+w config" in my directory, but when I Web-browse to the folder I get a "403: Forbidden" error. Here's all the info from that page:

Forbidden: You don't have permission to access /wiki/ on this server. Apache/2.0.48 (Unix) mod_perl/1.99_10 Perl/v5.6.1 PHP/5.0.0a3-alexdupre Server at www.thedestefanos.com Port 80

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks, deesto at yahoo dot com


 * First, try /wiki/index.php -- depending on Apache configuration, it might not consider index.php a valid index file and may have automatic index generation disabled. Next, check Apache's error_log. Then, check the permissions on the directory, the files, the parent directories, etc. Also, check the Apache configuration. --brion 19:18, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks brion!

- "First, try /wiki/index.php -- depending on Apache configuration, it might not consider index.php a valid index file and may have automatic index generation disabled." Tried that as well, same result. If it means anything, I can get to "/info.php" (the default PHP system info page) on my server with no problem.

- "Next, check Apache's error_log." Now this shows me something:

[Mon Dec 06 13:56:28 2004] [error] [client 66.133.138.130] Directory index forbidden by rule: /usr/www/wiki/

Maybe this speaks to your comment above, about possibly having "automatic index generation disabled"... I've never seen that error before.

- "Then, check the permissions on the directory, the files, the parent directories, etc." I ran 'chmod a+w /usr/www/wiki/config' when I tried to install. Since that didn't work, I just now chmod-ed the whole 'wiki' directory (which likely isn't a good idea), but that didn't work either.

- "Also, check the Apache configuration." This certainly could be the culprit... but the only real configuration changes I've made to httpd.conf were to add the PHP and Perl modules, and to create virtual hosts (I have to run two web sites from the same box). I haven't installed wikimedia beneath the 'default' virtual server directory. But, should that matter?

If looking at any of my configuration might give you a better idea of what I'm doing wrong, please let me know what files you'd like to see?

Thanks again,

John (deesto at yahoo dot com)

--66.133.138.130 19:46, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wait... it seems the combination of browsing to "/wiki/index.php" after running 'a+w /usr/www/wiki/' did the trick: I'm now able to access the install page (thanks!), but I keep having a problem with the "Database config" section. If I leave the value of "MySQL server" as 'localhost', it comes back with "MySQL error 1250: Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; consider upgrading MySQL client". If I change the value to the actual host name value (zurg), I get: "MySQL error 1130: Host 'zurg' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server".

Any thoughts? Thank you,

John --66.133.138.130 15:27, 7 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I have confirmed (as well as I possibly can) that this is not a mysql/connectivity issue. I installed another module that requires mysql, and that one is working fine. I'm also able to connect manually to the database I created for MediaWiki with the user I created for it. Regardless of what values I change in the installation HTML file, I get 'can't connect' errors.

I've now been fighting with this for over a week and would be grateful if someone could help me out. Thanks.

John --66.133.138.130 21:28, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)

At this point, I think I'd better move on to something else. Thanks anyway.

John


 * This is a problem with MySQL 4.1 and virtually every MySQL client program in the universe. Please read the MySQL release notes on this subject. --brion 05:38, 17 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, but it would have been more helpful to tell me what the problem was, than to have reiterated simply that there was a problem, which was painfully obvious. The generic connection error message wasn't helpful, since my MySQL server/client/binaries/libraries were all v.5+. If you'd just told me that I needed to down-grade my password protocol from "new" (32-hex) to "old" (16 char) style using the MySQL OLD_PASSWORD function, which I just figured out almost a year later, I might have been able to continue working with this.

Thanks anyway. Good luck with your project.