By ed4becky on

I have tried installing Drupal my Dell running Vista many times. The install always fails after completing the 'Configure Site' page. Its just never returns. If I abort and go to welcome page, all the links are corrupt.

I have tried with Drupal 6.2 and 6.3 now. No error message, just spins.

Help!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

ed4becky’s picture

ed4becky commented

OK, is there a way to trace (debug) the install scripts to see WHERE it is locking up?

(I am not a PHP programmer, but I know a few things)

luckysmack’s picture

luckysmack commented

Im on Vista an running under WAMP also. When i installed everything went smoothly. have you tried re-downloading the 6.3 files? or since WAMP is a big file maybe that was interrupted somehow and a file got corrupted. It should all install without a problem and with WAMP on the default settings. You could try viewing html source where the pages break maybe you could get some hints as to what your problem is.

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"The level of our success is limited only by our imagination" -Aesop

vss’s picture

vss commented

Vista, UAC turned off. I tried WAMP and XAMMP. Filled in "Configure site", turned off "Check for updates automatically". Clicked "Save and Continue", and it hangs.

I can log in from another window as admin, but I can't create contents - "Access denied".

tsorelle’s picture

tsorelle commented

I too am having the same problem as described, Drupal 6.2 under WAMP on Vista sp1

A little more information:
The configuration never completes. The installation _seems_ to be ok but denies access to content creation pages to the administrator account.

It would be helpful if someone could suggest how to manually complete the configuration process without re-running install.php.

Terry SoRelle

tsorelle’s picture

tsorelle commented

Apparently this is hanging on attempt to create the admin account. I upgraded to Drupal 6.4. No help. Other version info:
MySQL 5.0.45, PHP5.2.5, Apache 2.2.6.

I'm almost ready to bail out and give Joomla a try.

Terry SoRelle

thepocketgeek’s picture

thepocketgeek commented

I had the same problem. The only difference was that I was using XP instead of Vista. I ended up downloading the install files again. It worked the second time.
Hope that helps.

tsorelle’s picture

tsorelle commented

I'm glad to hear you made it work. Could you say a little more about what you mean by "downloading the install files?" Does that mean you downloaded files from a working installation? Which files?

Thanks,
Terry SoRelle

tsorelle’s picture

tsorelle commented

I found the issue for my case at least. The lockup was due to the lack of a local smtp server. Vista does not install one by default. Drupal would hang when attempting to send the user notification e-mail on new account creation. I ran my test SMTP server and that got me through.

For testing I use the Antix development SMTP server (http://www.antix.co.uk/Projects/SMTPServerForDevelopers.aspx) . It captures but does not send e-mail. It works fine with Pear Mail (smtp mode) but returns an error when the standard php mail() function is used. Which raises another question. Is there support for SMTP authentication? Is there a plug-in or config change to make Drupal use Pear or some other alternative SMTP method?

Terry SoRelle

luckysmack’s picture

luckysmack commented

http://drupal.org/project/smtp

you can also change your settings in php.ini to point to an smtp server (gmail) to do the mailing for you
open php.ini and search for:

SMTP

and you should see a few settings for pointing to a smtp server. to use googles the port should be "465" and the server should be "smtp.gmail.com". there is a section for windows users and one for linux based users, just change the one that applies. If you have a generic email account such as "webmaster" or similar that feedback is mailed to use that as the email it would be sending from. I have since moved my site to an online server so i dont have my php.ini to look at but thats how i had accomplished it. but if you want something more solid and you will be using it extensively i recommend getting a local smtp server. shouldnt give you any problems

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"The level of our success is limited only by our imagination" -Aesop

tsorelle’s picture

tsorelle commented

I found something that works even better in the test environment. You can point Drupal to an alternative routine for SMTP handling. You create a file with a mail wrapper function and point to it with the 'smtp_library' setting (details below). In testing on the local dev environment, I usually want to just not send e-mail so I implemented a wrapper that just returns 'true':

function drupal_mail_wrapper($message) {
    return true;
}

I named the file null_mail_wrapper.inc. To plug them in I put a line in the settings file line this:

$conf['smtp_library'] = 'tops/tops_lib/drupal/ext/null_mail_wrapper.inc';

Replace my file path with your location offset from the drupal root directory.

I also created a wrapper with a real implemantation using the Pear Mail function. My local Antix server likes this better (see previous post). I use this scenario when I want to see outgoing email without actually sending any. Another solution would be to have your wrapper write the messages out to a text file.

Additionally, Pear Mail handles SMTP authentication so I can use my Pear implementation in production if that is required.

These instructions are for Drupal 6.x only. It took a little while to figure out because most of the blog posts referred to 5.x. The configuration file was different in 5.x and the method signiture for the wrapper function changed in 6.x. In 6.x the wrapper takes the same parmameter (message array) as drupal_mail_send() in includes\mail.inc. See the function header comments for a full description.

cheers,
Terry SoRelle

jmohr’s picture

jmohr commented

Thanks, not having a local SMTP server was also causing this same issue for me.

andrewbenkard’s picture

andrewbenkard commented

Nifty fix, thanks very much Terry.

pablokenfold’s picture

pablokenfold commented

Albeit not in Vista, but in XP. SMTP had nothing to do with it, as when I succeeded it just said it couldn't email me the details, but did complete successfully.

The problem was in my php.ini settings. If someone else has this problem, I suggest clicking on the wamp menu > mySQL > php.ini (this should open it up in notepad or a smiliar program), key in your "find" command, (ctrl+f for me) type "memory" (without the quotes). This should take you to the maximum memory setting to be used by a php script. It defauts to 8 or 16 Mb IIRC. Change the numeric value to 128 leaving everything else in this file intact.

This will make php scripts able to take up to 128 Megabytes of memory, which is just fine for a test server. Next thing you need to do is stop and restart wamp services (you could do with just stoppping and starting MySQL, but why not restart the whole thing?)

If you still have problems, I suggest you go into phpmyadmin, delete the whole database you're attempting to use, and create a new one.

milesoldenburg’s picture

milesoldenburg commented

The problem was with SMTP for me as well. In my php.ini, my SMTP was pointing to a SMTP server that was not working. I changed it to localhost even though I didn't have a local SMTP server and the install completed successfully (although it will tell you there is an error with mail()). You can always go back and fix your php.ini later!