topic Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time? in Alfresco Archive

Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

gronfelt — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 07:08:14 GMT

I'm running Community 3.2 with multi-tenancy enabled and from time to time my users can't enter specific sites in Share. The problem first appeared yesterday and after a few tries during 5-10 minutes everything seemed to work. Now the situation is the same again, this morning our users could not ent

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

mikeh — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 15:40:46 GMT

There are no scheduled jobs as part of Share itself. What sort of time does this problem occur?

Thanks,
Mike

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

gronfelt — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:12:35 GMT

A little update on this one.

It doesn't seem to be limited to a certain time of day, the issue occurs irregularly. What happens is that a user clicking on the Site link is redirected back to the User Dashboard. Resources in an affected site are still accessible, for instance if a user clicks on a document in the My Site Activities dashlet the document page is shown, however the site header (with the title and the menu bar) will not appear.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

mikeh — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:14:41 GMT

Any errors in the log files? It looks like a server resource issue perhaps…

Thanks,
Mike

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

loftux — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:33:13 GMT

I've seen this problem when hitting the "to many open files" on linux.
See http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Search#File_Handles_and_lucene

So follow the instructions to increase ulimit, or try putting Share client on a separate server. I could not get limits.conf changes work on ubuntu when restricted to a particular user, so you may have to use the wildcard * instead of the username for your tomcat instance.

Anyway, the sites are not broken, a restart of tomcat will make your Share sites look good again. Or as you may have seen, after a period of time the sites recover.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

gronfelt — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:49:51 GMT

I suppose the problem could be too many open files, but I've already set the soft limit to 4096 and also there are no complaints about "too many open files" in catalina.out, which there where before raising the limit.

However, I will try to raise the limit the next time the issue occurs, hopefully that might be the problem after all.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

paolo — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:52:18 GMT

I have the same issue but for sure it's not a problem of "too many open files" since on our system there are just a couple of active users and just few files in the repository.
Any suggestions?
Unfortunately i cannot find any help from catalina.log.

Paolo

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

jtp — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:17:45 GMT

I've also seen this issue once, a site had been recently modified and I kept getting redirected to my dashboard instead of the site's. 10 minutes later it was fine.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

gronfelt — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:14:53 GMT

FYI, I've filed a bug report concerning this in the JIRA:
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ALFCOM-3306

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

paolo — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 07:20:44 GMT

Thanks.
I consider this as a really critical bug. Someone knows a workaround for this bug?

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

kevinr — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:24:18 GMT

This looks like it might be a regression. It sounds *very similar* to a bug that occurred in one of the first versions of the Share application and was quickly fixed. I have a feeling (i am guessing) that it is related to the changes made to Share to support Multi-Tennant - which annoyingly also broke NTLM support for Share - so I suspect this is actually the same problem under the covers, and has caused this regression also. I will see if we can investigate ASAP.

Thanks,

Kevin

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

kevinr — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:41:52 GMT

Can anyone who has seen this please tell me what their setup is, i.e. Alfresco/Share versions, are they on separate Tomcats instances or same one, server OS type, authentication used for share/repo etc. as this will *really* help us in finding out if this -is- a regression or not. As i have found the old bug relating to this:
https://issues.alfresco.com/jira/browse/ETHREEOH-806
but it only occurred when using NTLM on Share so it may not be the same issue…

I've asked around and none of the engineers nor QA have actually seen this issue occur locally so as much information as you can provide would be great thanks!

Kevin

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

jtp — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:50:37 GMT

New install of 3.2 Community on Win2003. One Tomcat instance. Alfresco is SSO Passthru with LDAP Sync. Share is manual authentication passthru. Share would be SSO, but as you mentioned, there's a bug. Gronfelt and I are the major posters in that thread, so I'm not surprised to see us having similar issues here. Anything else I can provide? If you need to see my authentication subsystems configuration let me know.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

paolo — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:52:28 GMT

From jira:

Kevin,
we are running Alfresco Community edition 3.2 on a unique tomcat instance.
It's running on CentOS 5 with Alfresco Ntlm authentication.
Please let me know if you need more details on our system.

Paolo

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

kevinr — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:00:29 GMT

Paolo, are you using Multi-tennant?

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

kevinr — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:05:01 GMT

Looks like everyone who has seen this is using some form of Alfresco SSO Passthru - be it NTLM or LDAP…? So I'm starting to wonder if this regression has been caused by the refactoring of the sub-system authentication on the repository side (which is significant as the fix to the original bug required some notable changes to the repository client auth layer - which has changed a lot since the sub-system refactor…)

Thanks for any further info!

Kev

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

paolo — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:06:35 GMT

No we are not using multi-tenant.
Just consider that our system is pretty much similar to a default Alfresco 3.2 installation since we didn't change a lot since the first installation.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

paolo — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:11:32 GMT

Kevin we are using the default alfrescoNtlm authentication that come with the first installation. No changes on the authentication side.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

gronfelt — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:24:15 GMT

We're running an installation that was originally the standard 3.2 release, since then it has been rebuilt with sources from the HEAD. This problem occurred both before and after rebuilding.

We're using LDAP authentication only, against OpenLDAP with an authentication chain with two LDAP instances. We've also enabled Multi-tenancy.

Server is CentOS 5.3.

Re: Users can't enter site in Share for a short period of time?

kevinr — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:39:38 GMT

Alfresco QA have confirmed the issue. I'll let you know when we have more details.

Kev