[LON-CAPA-admin] Action : Invalid Access

[Stuart Raeburn]

Hon Kie,

Your second report is puzzling.

loncontrol stop/start/restart in neither 2.7.99.1 nor 2.7.99.0 will  
report anything about lonhttpd.  (This lightweight httpd daemon has  
been eliminated from LON-CAPA 2.8 due to institutional  
policies/firewall issues for non-standard ports (such as 8080, where  
lonhttpd listened).

However, stop/start/restart in LON-CAPA 2.7.1 (and previous versions)  
will report actions for this daemon.  That said the previous use of  
the lightweight http daemon to serve a number of commonly used items,  
such as icons etc. would seem to be unrelated to the reported "Invalid  
Access" error for /res/fsu/ng/mathReview/geometry/arcLength.problem

"Invalid Access" is a response generated by lonacc.pm when   
&Apache::lonnet::symbverify() returns 0.  This can occur if there is a  
problem with the symb (a resource identifier which includes the url,  
as well as map context), or if the url of the resource is absent from  
the corresponding /home/httpd/perl/tmp/$uname_$udom_$cnum.db file  
(e.g., 	/home/httpd/perl/tmp/raeburn_msu_33803011027874598msul1.db)  
which contains  information about resources in a course.  This .db  
file is initially constructed during course initialization after a  
role is selected in a course.

I don't see any difference between 2.7.99.0 and 2.7.99.1 as far as  
this behavior is concerned.  My guess is that the loncontrol restart  
re-enabled connectivity between access server and library server such  
that the next time the $uname_$udom_$cnum.db file in  
/home/httpd/perl/tmp
  was updated (for a specific user for the particular course) the  
information form the course's homeserver about available resources was  
complete and symbverify() returned a true value for the symb for the  
/res/fsu/ng/mathReview/geometry/arcLength.problem resource.

I tested this out in the MSU domain using a student role in a session  
running on a 2.7.1 access server for a course on a library server  
running 2.7.99.1, which I assume is the configuration you had (based  
on the versions numbers reported by the log-in pages for the various  
FSU LON-CAPA servers).  I did not encounter the "Invalid Access"  
condition for an instance of your resource:  
/res/fsu/ng/mathReview/geometry/arcLength.problem which I had included  
in my course, when either first displaying the resource, or  
subsequently submitting an answer.

I would recommend replacing 2.7.99.0 with 2.7.99.1 on a production  
server, as the latter does fix a few small issues in the 99.0 version  
(the initial testing release for 2.8).

Stuart Raeburn
MSU LON-CAPA group




Quoting "H.K. Ng" <hkng at fsu.edu>:

> The problem seems to be related to 2.7.99.1 loncontrol. When I stop
> loncontrol, it says that lonhttpd is not running, but 2.7.99.0 does not
> give that message and does not have lonhttpd running. Installing
> 2.7.99.0 solves the problem. -hk
>
>
> At 12:52 PM 1/7/2009, you wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> This morning is the start of the spring semester and when students   
>> tried to submit the answer the following message shows up
>>
>>
>>
>> LON-CAPA Access Control
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ----------
>>
>>
>> Access  : Browse resources
>> Resource: /res/fsu/ng/mathReview/geometry/arcLength.problem
>> Action  : Invalid Access
>>
>>
>> ----------
>>
>>
>>
>> Sorry ...
>>
>>
>>
>> This action is currently not authorized.
>>
>> Initially I thought it has to do with the open date being   
>> incorrectly set but that doesn't solve it. Seems to work on the   
>> library server but not on the access servers.
>>
>> Any idea what may be causing this?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -hk