The Perceptus Back Story

Originally this post was going to document my troubleshooting of my login problem with the web based administrative interface of SME Server 7 after my bare (virtual) metal restore. In the end, I gave up fixing the problem, and did the upgrade via CD to SME Server 8 beta 6.  This didn’t turn out to be an easy fix, and I also had my eye on some nice benefits to upgrading to SME8, such as PHP5 and MySQL5 (finally!)

The following now serves as a review of how I think the “server-manager” interface is delivered in SME’s architecture.  It’s elegant, but complex.

The exact error was:

Unfortunately, I just didn’t know how to troubleshoot this error.  A lot of the problem was that SME is more complex than your normal web server do to  security precautions.

This is how I think the “server-manager” GUI is hosted:

• You normally go to https://192.168.81.1/server-manager (or whatever your server’s local IP is)
• The web server, “httpd”, which runs as user www and group www (which I assume has minimal permissions) then reverse proxies to a second httpd process, httpd-admin
• The second Apache server, httpd-admin, runs on port 980, and runs as user admin and group admin.
• The 2nd web server has it’s own configuration files.
• The web scripts are in this folder: /etc/e-smith/web/panels/manager/
• On a fresh install, the Linux admin user is group id 101, and the admin group is id 101 (my restored server had a different group id)

An example today about how an error message can make the difference between a happy end user, and an annoyed end user that is willing to blog about it – that’s me.

If you try to login to your account on the Fido.ca website, at about 11:30PM Pacific Time, you will get this error message: “Sorry! Your request cannot be completed at this time. Please try again later.”

On any other website, I would assume that there is a temporary, generally one-time, issue. Maybe the site is overloaded, or it might have a technical glitch. That’s OK. In Fido land? This error means that the website is down for it’s nightly maintenance and I should give up and try tomorrow, but earlier in the night because Fido doesn’t like people on the West Coast.

This isn’t listed anywhere – it’s something that I’ve deduced over months of using the Fido site to pay my bill by credit card. I’m not impressed that Fido’s website has a nightly maintenance schedule, especially one that seems to kick in before midnight Vancouver time, but I’m really not impressed by the wording of the error. All they need to do is follow the banks and fess up to their maintenance schedule. Something like, “Hi, the Fido.ca user site is unavailable from 11PM to 6AM PST. Please try again during our operating hours.”

As an aside, if you’re wondering what the error message is if you have entered your phone number or password wrong, it’s “No match for that phone number and password was found. Please try again… Sorry! No match was found for that phone number and password. Please retry.” in a red box right above the login boxes. I kept getting the “Please try again later” error, so at one time I wondered if I had been using the wrong password.

Is this a big enough annoyance to make me switch my cell plan away from Fido? No, but this added to various other annoyances and… well… I’ll certainly be evaluating my options when the new wireless providers in Canada start up in 2010.