[LON-CAPA-admin] Prepare printable document stalling on 2.8.1 / fedora 9

[Stuart Raeburn]

Michael,

This seems to be a TeX issue specific to Fedora 9 (which uses the  
TeXLive packaging of TeX instead of tetex (which had been used for  
other supported distros).  In printout.pl it appears that running the  
latex command over the .tex file to generate the .dvi was failing.

Running:

/usr/bin/texconfig rehash

then

/usr/bin/fmtutil-sys --missing

fixed this issue for me on a Fedora 9 test installation.  Afterwards  
printout.pl would generate the dvi (and ultimately the PDF).

It is possible that the rehash alone would fix the problem (I didn't  
test again after just the first step).

Investigations continue ...


Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group

Quoting loncapa_admin <loncapa_admin at johnabbott.qc.ca>:

> Hello, I was wondering if this is just a local problem, or if others  
>  have seen the same behaviour.
>
> I upgraded our servers to loncapa 2.8.1 just after our semester   
> ended in May.  Before then, we had been running 2.8.0 with no   
> printing problems.  Since then, our servers were under pretty light   
> load and it's possible the  "Prepare a printable document" feature   
> wasn't tested.
>
> I've just received a message from one of our teachers stating that   
> the "Prepare printable documents" feature wasn't working.  I've   
> since tried it myself and can confirm that it's stalling on "Class   
> Print Status: for Michael T Dugdale now LaTeXing file,  bytes   
> generated."  That's it, no byte count... the page never refreshes.
>
> Under /var/log/httpd/errorlog, I'm getting:
> "[Sun Aug 23 12:31:26 2009] [error] [client 96.23.67.210] Couldn't   
> open log file   
> /home/httpd/prtspool/michaeldugdale_johnabbott_printout_1251045083_6544_1.log for reading: No such file or directory, referer:   
> http://kepler.johnabbott.qc.ca/adm/printout"
>
> Checking the *errors logs in /home/httpd/perls/logs, I'm not seeing   
> anything, nor in any other logs under /var/log.
>
> Looking in /home/httpd/prtspool, I can see that the .tex file is   
> being generated.  Interestingly enough, if I manually latex the file  
>  (thus producing the associated .dvi, .aux and .log files) in   
> /home/httpd/prtspool/ and then refresh the browser page, the   
> printable pdf is produced correctly.
>
> So it seems that the tex file is produced correctly, and the dvips   
> -> pstopdf chain is working correctly, but not the first call to   
> latex.
>
>
> Has anyone else seen such behaviour in 2.8.1, or is this a purely   
> local problem?  Any thoughts would be appreciated.
>
> Many thanks!
>
>
> Michael Dugdale
> Department of Physics
> John Abbott College
> 21275 Lakeshore Road
> Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Québec
> H9X 3L9
>
> (514) 457-6610 X 5888
> loncapa_admin at johnabbott.qc.ca
>
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