Flashes of Inspiration

On Tuesday afternoon, and update to the EdWeb distro was released – 1.6. http://dist.drupal.is.ed.ac.uk/project/uoe_distribution, and the following day the site started warning us that there was an update available. So far, so good.

The following day I updated webtest.inf with a fresh copy of the live web.inf site, and did a diff of the code. It seemed mostly the latest updates to drupal core that we were missing, plus some other EdWeb changes, but it didn’t look like new functionality, and the release notes didn’t mention anything.

When I tried the recommended upgrade procedure using drush it seemed to go smoothly, more smoothly that previous updates, but the site is now broken, and all pages reporting the error:

Fatal error: Class name must be a valid object or a string in /disk/data/edweb/includes/common.inc on line 7998

More worrying, it also reports the same when doing drush commands, even drush status. I don’t really know what to do, so I’ve reported the problem to website.support@ed (UniDeskI151120-0697)  and given then copies of the site and DB before and after the update.

I suspect it is a problem with some content we have, rather than our local theme, as happened once before in the early days. Some simple debugging shows

$type_info = entity_get_info($entity_type);

Is returning an undefined value for something called “rules_config”, which seems to be a module used in the distro. My hope is that someone who knows will spot a problem with our DB, and give us some SQL to fix it.

In the meantime I’m going to revert webtest.inf back to the live web.inf, remove our local theme, and try the update again to see if that makes any difference.

Neil

While looking at the various drupal versions we have, I spotted that we had an old version on canny.inf (our www.inf DR mirror machine). A while a go I’d started setting it up to add a mirror of web.inf (drip), but obviously hadn’t quite finished it off.

So I’ve now got something going, that every four hours (when the normal www.inf DR copies are taken) it also rsync’s the data from web.inf and restores web.inf on canny.

At the moment, it was simpler to have the web mirror running on a non-standard port (I can’t remember why at the moment) so the DR copy of web.inf is actually http://dripped.inf.ed.ac.uk:8088/.

While doing this, I hit some problems with stopping and restarting MySQL, it was taking longer to start up/shutdown than expected and then it was restarted. Some things complained about mysql not being available. Co-incidentally Duncan from physics hit a similar problem, so some work may need to be done to make stopping and starting more robust. I’ll probably add a “dont do backup at stop” option too.