Invision Community 4: SEO, prepare for v5 and dormant account notifications By Matt Monday at 02:04 PM
TestDood Posted February 15, 2022 Posted February 15, 2022 (edited) I've recently updated my Debian Stretch 9 system to Debian Buster 10 and have installed PHP 7.4. I'm attempting to manualyl upgrade my Invision Community forum from 3.x to 4.6.10 and am running into a "Please create a [...]/datastore directory and make it writeable." error when visiting my site's admin/upgrade page. Please see the attached .pdf excerpt from my sysadmin journal for details on the file permissions I have and an attempted failed solution I tried to chmod the directory. Invision_upgrade_problem.pdf Please advise on what I'm missing here on debugging this. Thank you, /Jay Edited February 15, 2022 by TestDood
TestDood Posted February 15, 2022 Author Posted February 15, 2022 p.s. celebrating my 19th year(!) of using Invision -- first time I've had to file a plea for help.
Marc Posted February 15, 2022 Posted February 15, 2022 We are unfortunately unable to assist with upgrades from the 3.x platform, as we have no provided support for that item for a long long time now. However with this, the reality is its something you need to contact your hosting company on anyway. The folder is unable to be written to by our system, which is an issue on your hosting. I can certainly move this to our community support for you, as others may have come across similar issues when upgrading from 3.x., but it does look to be hosting there.
TestDood Posted February 15, 2022 Author Posted February 15, 2022 (edited) I am the hosting provider. I'm root access to my Debian Buster 10 box. Did you look at my .pdf where I ls -l file permissions? Please assist with file permissions information. I guess you are saying "Please post this in the support forum"? Advise where that is, seeing this is the first time I've required support in the 19 years I've sys admin-ed my Invision installation. Thanks. Edited February 15, 2022 by TestDood
TestDood Posted February 15, 2022 Author Posted February 15, 2022 I've been paying yearly fees for this software for going on 19 years. Can I please have a unix support engineer to communicate with?
Randy Calvert Posted February 15, 2022 Posted February 15, 2022 (edited) Hosting support is not something that is provided. IPS is a software company and as a result, they don't have unix support engineers available to assist you. They can only provide support for the software itself. They do offer a hosted version of their software where you don't have to worry about managing all of this and setting up the hosting environment to meet the requirements. With that being said... If you're running suexec for PHP, you won't be able to use 777 for folder permissions. It will block the request from executing. (Since you mention the error only happens after setting permissions to 777, that would lead me to think this is a good possibility!) If that is the case, you might need to try other permissions such as 755. Finally with a 500 error is being returned, I would recommend you also investigate the server error logs and see what errors are being logged. It might be able to point you in the right direction. Edited February 15, 2022 by Randy Calvert
TestDood Posted February 15, 2022 Author Posted February 15, 2022 Thanks for the help and clarification about support, Randy.
TDBF Posted February 15, 2022 Posted February 15, 2022 59 minutes ago, TestDood said: Thanks for the help and clarification about support, Randy. You could have an issue with your constant.php file and datastore entries. I had the same issue last week and it was due to an issue with my constant.php and corrupt datastore entries. Marc fixed my issues, maybe he could let you know what he did to fix mines and to see if that solution works for you.
TestDood Posted February 23, 2022 Author Posted February 23, 2022 (edited) I was incorrect when I said "I'm manually upgrading my Invision Community forum from 3.x to 4.6.10". I'm actually on 4.3.6 and trying to upgrade it to 4.6.10. Tonight I restored my 4.3.6 forum from backup and have it running in its old location on my apache2 server (/var/www/html/forums), which is setup for PHP5.3 on that apache2 <directory> using php-fpm. Of course, I can't upgrade to 4.6.10 in place there, because 4.6.10 wants PHP 7.0 or later. So, I went ahead and created a new sub domain on my server that is using PHP7.4 just fine at /var/www/forums/ apache2 <directory>. But, if I move my forum to that new subdomain, I get the 500 error I mentioned earlier. I'm using the local file system for data storage. When visiting the "Data Storage" tab on my 4.3.6 system, it lists the location of /var/www/html/forums/datastorage. If I move the forum to /var/www/forums do I need to redirect that location by hand somehow? I grepped through my forum directory for that path but found it nowhere. Is this the cause of the 500 error? Looking at my php error_log gives no indication on what's going on. It is my hope to move my 4.3.6 forum from the PHP5.3 directory to the PHP7.4 directory and then hit the upgrade button on it. Edited February 23, 2022 by TestDood
Recommended Posts