PHPbb3 upload issue

Troubleshooting
1

I have installed and updated PHPbb through the script initially, then manually as the update is required.
No issues at all apart from one thing.

Large uploads. They always fail.
I have changed ownership and chmod to 777 still no difference.

Changed back to default, and obviously no difference.

It does throw an error “HTTP Error”, and that’s all I get.
Now looking at the apache logs at /var/log/apache2 they’re empty.

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root adm 0 Aug 18 14:09 access.log
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root adm 0 Aug 18 14:17 error.log
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root adm 0 Aug 18 14:09 other_vhosts_access.log
As you can see I’ve chmod to 777 and still zero bytes.

So how do I get the system to write to the error log so I can track down this problem?

2

have a look to

journalctl -u apache2.service

maybe there are some more information.

As well you could increase log level inside /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. Current value should be warning LogLevel warn. You could try changing it to trace8, ..., trace1 or debug.

3

Strange, but after a lot of experimenting, it seems to be files of 4GB or larger that have an issue, and I know EXT4 doesn’t have a 4GB limit, so it must be PHPbb I think.

4

You are running 32 bit or 64bit os? And did you checked memory consumption during upload?

5

64bit and memory is never higher than 500MB, usually around 300MB but the occasional peak up to 500MB.

6

did you tried to increase log level to check what happens?

7

Hi Joulinar, I have change to trace, debug trace 1-8, error and more.
The log files are still zero bytes.

I’ve change the log file to ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

Nothing makes a difference.
Journalctl does give a lot of information, but no sign of the specific error.

It just can’t get it to log anything. Not even user access.

-rwxrwxrwx 1 root adm    0 Oct  7 17:39 access.log
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root adm    0 Oct  7 17:39 error.log
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root adm    0 Oct  7 17:39 other_vhosts_access.log
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   0 Oct  8 10:15 web.log
8 
# ErrorLog: The location of the error log file.
# If you do not specify an ErrorLog directive within a <VirtualHost>
# container, error messages relating to that virtual host will be
# logged here.  If you *do* define an error logfile for a <VirtualHost>
# container, that host's errors will be logged there and not here.
#
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/web.log

#
# LogLevel: Control the severity of messages logged to the error_log.
# Available values: trace8, ..., trace1, debug, info, notice, warn,
# error, crit, alert, emerg.
# It is also possible to configure the log level for particular modules, e.g.
# "LogLevel info ssl:warn"
#
LogLevel error
9

It’s no big deal Joulinar, it’s just a bug I would like to fix, but even if it never gets fixed, then I can live with it.

10

you could try to ask on phpBB community if someone has an idea. Anyway to enable access log on Apache, you would need to activate it first :slight_smile: Add following line into your configuration and restart Apache.

CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

Files are filling up on my test system

root@DietPiR5S:~# ls -la /var/log/apache2/
total 8
drwxr-x--- 2 root adm  100 Oct  8 11:23 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 220 Oct  8 11:24 ..
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  655 Oct  8 11:30 access.log
-rw-r----- 1 root adm  405 Oct  8 11:23 error.log
-rw-r----- 1 root adm    0 Oct  8 11:23 other_vhosts_access.log
root@DietPiR5S:~#
11

looks like a timeout error, 503 (service not available)

[08/Oct/2022:13:37:44 +0100] "POST /forum/posting.php?mode=reply&t=463 HTTP/1.1" 503 3425 "-" "Mozilla/5.0

Out of curiosity, what does the number after the status code mean? In this case it’s 3425.
Now to track down the reason for the timeout, PHP, Apache or PHPbb.

Thank you Joulinar.

12

It’s the size of the object sent to the client, measured in bytes.

13

Thank you Jappe. Now I know :slight_smile:

14

Sorted it.
The database index attachments_filesize is set to int(20), and the number limit is the same as the old 4GB file limit.

Changed to bigint(20) and I think the limit is now 16 petabytes. So it’ll be a while before that’s a problem :slight_smile:

I’d like to thank PHPbb for being bloody useless as usual.
I don’t even know why I keep using PHPbb.

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