Must be your PATH environment variable. You have usually different paths when running interactively or as a service. Try to change the path seen by services, or put the ImageMagick executable in the same directory as elogd.

Stefan

I have a crontab set-up for root:

crontab -e

* * * * *       if ! ps -C elogd >/dev/null;then /sbin/service elogd restart;fi

The script just checks if elogd is still running and if not, it'll restart it. We run Centos, but I'm sure it'll be easy to adapt for Ubuntu (I don't know much about Debian).

This will only help if elogd really crashed; in case it is still running at 100% cpu load this won't help.

In our case (~30 logbooks, > 100 entries per day, ~ hundred users) elogd is crashing about once a week. With the help of this script it means 1 minute downtime a week: that's acceptable.

See https://midas.psi.ch/elog/config.html on how to use a logfile with elogd. Here's the relevant excerpt:

• Logfile = <file>
  This option specifies a filename which logs all login/logout activities and successful user connections for logbooks with user level access. The the logging level (see below) is larger than 1, also read and write accesses can be logged.
• Logging level = 1 | 2 | 3
  Specifies the logging level. The higher this value, the more information is logged. Default is 2:
  • 1: Log only logins and logouts
  • 2: Log also write accesses
  • 3: Log also read accesses

I don't know if you can get elog to generate a log file - check the documentation, I don't bother.  But I do have some experience with this matter.

There are two related circumstances I know of that can arise which will cause elog to crash.

As you are probably aware, the entries are threaded.  I find the main problem is if you move a long thread - I forget the number but over 30 entries - from one log book to another, it will copy across fine, but the deletion of the thread from the source logbook will crash elog *before* the entire thread has been deleted: cause 1.

If you then restart elog, and happen to access the partially deleted thread, elog will run into a loop.  You won't be able to access elog, and you will see it is burning up CPU time, and it probably will eventually crash, but normally I find what the process number is and kill it (with "kill -9 [process no]").  This is cause 2.  The reason is that elog is looking for an entry number in the thread that no longer exists (because elog has already deleted it).

There is a moderately convoluted way I have devised to completely delete the partially deleted thread, needing access to the yymmdda.log files.  Cause 2 can also occur if someone manually edits yymmdda.log files with insufficient care (that includes me on occasion).  

Dear all,

I have elog version 3.12-bd75964 installed on an Ubuntu OS. We started working with it yesterday and today I was informed that the users could not connect to the elog. When I tried it was also not possible to get to the elog website. After restarting the Ubuntu machine everything was back to normal.

Is there a log I can check to find out why the elog stopped working?

Regards,

John

Update:

While the image scaling via ImageMagick works when running elog manually it doesn't when running elog as a service. The service is hosted in the same user environment that allows image scaling with elog started manually. What else could go wrong?

Christian

Hi,

Maybe the post is outdated already, but I want to share my experience anyway. I faced the same problem as Daniel: The most recent ImageMagick package was not detected by elogd even though it was installed. I could trace back the problem to the following issue:

Stefan mentioned that the ImageMagick software is detected via the 'convert' command. Since ImageMagick V7, however, the 'convert' command is no longer supported. So, when installing ImageMagick V6 the detection works.

@Stefan: Maybe you could adapt the software detection at some point? Thanks.

Christian

This command makes the Homepage a FIND page: Start page = ?cmd=Find

My question is: can we pre-populate some of the search fields and execute the search so that the homepage becomes the SEARCH RESULTS

Probably us not having ImageMagick installed. elog was able to attach pdf's, xpm's and xbm's to email, but not jpeg's or png's, though they inlined OK in HTML on the server.

It seems OK, I think, after installing ImageMagick and restarting.