Hi Stefan,

Found it, it was a typo.

Thanks for your patience and support.

Regards,

John

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

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).  

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 have Split Elog to Two Top Group [Check the Config Below].

Problem = 

After Staff01 login successfully to http://127.0.0.1/Staff and if he/she fill the url http://127.0.0.1/Administrator and choose any elog topic, it will direct registration form.

[global]
port = 8080
Self register = 0
Show top groups = 1
Preset Author = $long_name
Locked Attributes = Author
Restrict edit = 1

Top group Staff = Website, Notes
Top group Administrator = Website Update, Admin Notes, Ticketing

[global Staff]
Menu commands = List, New, Edit, Reply, Duplicate, Find, Config
Password file = staff.pwd
Admin user = sylpid
Login user = staff01

[global Administrator]
Password file = admin.pwd
Admin user = sylpid
Login user = admin01

It would be new to me if elog would support independent [global] sections for each logbook.
I thought you can only have one [global] section. Whatever is defined in that section will be valid for all logbooks.

If you need to have different user files, you'll need to run different elogd services with independent config files (and Password files).

Andreas

Hi Andreas

I'm following the instruction from https://midas.psi.ch/elog/config.html#groups , please scroll to the Top Groups

Group Linux PCs = Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake
Group Windows PCs = 98, ME, NT, XP, CE
Group CE = 1.0, 2.UL

Top group engineering = Linux PCs, Windows PCs
Top group administration = Employees, Purchases

[global engineering]
Password file = engineers.pwd
Admin user = stefan

[global administration]
Password file = admin.pwd
Admin user = bill

Aparently I've missed that one :-)

In order to test your problem it would be useful to have a minimal config file to reproduce the problem. Yours does not include any actual logbook, only [global *] sections.

Andreas

Group Linux PCs = Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake
Group Windows PCs = 98, ME, NT, XP, CE
Group CE = 1.0, 2.UL

Top group engineering = Linux PCs, Windows PCs
Top group administration = Employees, Purchases

[global engineering]
Password file = engineers.pwd
Admin user = stefan

[global administration]
Password file = admin.pwd
Admin user = bill