[LON-CAPA-admin] Can't see one of my student's problems

[Raeburn, Stuart]

Nathan,

Can't connect to loncapa.winona.edu:443 when using LWP is typically seen when the SSL/TLS certificate chain is incorrect, but whatsmychaincert.com suggests the chain is correct for your server.

Is the Ubuntu package liblwp-protocol-https-perl installed?
Does /home/httpd/lonTabs/hosts.tab contain:

winonal1:winona:library:loncapa.winona.edu:https:winona.edu

If you can view submissions by other students for the same problem, it might be that this student's submission(s) contain(s) control characters or other non-printable characters, etc. which are causing problems when LON-CAPA makes an internal call to render for the web and answer targets.

The entries from the web server's error.log don't seem related.

"Course not initialized" when displaying /adm/navmaps suggests a student loading Course Contents in a browser tab/window for which the course session has been removed by the nightly clean up (by cron) of files for "inactive" sessions in /home/httpd/perl/tmp

Invalid URI in request POST /cgi is for someone looking for vulnerabilities in your cgi-bin directory.

Unless you have your domain configured to disallow hosting of user sessions for users in the winona domain on servers in other LON-CAPA domains, one thing to try to troubleshoot this would, when already logged into loncapa.winona.edu would  be to replace the URL in the browser's address bar with 

loncapa.winona.edu/adm/switchserver?otherserver=<hostID>

replacing <hostID> with the LON-CAPA hostID of another LON-CAPA server., so you could transfer your LON-CAPA session to a different server to see if the same problem is seen there, when accessing a student's view of

You could transfer to the MSU "demo server, which has a hostID of msudemol1 if you like, although that server is running 2.11.4, whereas you own server is still on 2.11.3.

Other questions:

Is encryptedURL set for this problem?
Is there a discussion board attached to this problem (with posts from students).

Stuart Raeburn
LON-CAPA Academic Consortium
________________________________________
From: LON-CAPA-admin <lon-capa-admin-bounces at mail.lon-capa.org> on behalf of Moore, Nathan T via LON-CAPA-admin <lon-capa-admin at mail.lon-capa.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2024 6:16 PM
To: list about administration and system updating
Subject: [LON-CAPA-admin] Can't see one of my student's problems

I’d like to see the randomized problem that one of my students is working on.  I go to the grading section, click on the individual problem she’s working on and get a report that looks like that pasted below.  Specifically:

Can't connect to loncapa.winona.edu:443 (Invalid argument) Invalid argument at /usr/share/perl5/LWP/Protocol/http.pm line 50.

Wondering if this is a problem with my problem authoring/permissions, a problem with my server setup, or something else?
Student Submissions
Folder:
Ch 01
Resource:
pancakes.problem
View of the problem for ....
Can't connect to loncapa.winona.edu:443 (Invalid argument) Invalid argument at /usr/share/perl5/LWP/Protocol/http.pm line 50.
Correct answer for ....
Can't connect to loncapa.winona.edu:443 (Invalid argument) Invalid argument at /usr/share/perl5/LWP/Protocol/http.pm line 50.

Maybe related, on my server, loncapa.winona.edu I see the following logfile error

cat /var/log/apache2/error.log
…
[Wed Jan 31 05:10:29.559778 2024] [mpm_prefork:notice] [pid 2821] AH00163: Apache/2.4.41 (Ubuntu) OpenSSL/1.1.1f mod_perl/2.0.11 Perl/v5.30.0 configured -- resuming normal operations
[Wed Jan 31 05:10:29.559797 2024] [core:notice] [pid 2821] AH00094: Command line: '/usr/sbin/apache2'
[Wed Jan 31 09:55:56.249258 2024] [:error] [pid 782852] access to /adm/navmaps failed for 199.17.155.254, reason: Course not initialized for ... domain winona access bre
[Wed Jan 31 10:24:38.223130 2024] [core:error] [pid 808983] [client 45.95.147.236:44118] AH00126: Invalid URI in request POST /cgi-bin/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/.%2e/bin/sh HTTP/1.1
[Wed Jan 31 10:59:53.619649 2024] [:error] [pid 808832] access to /adm/navmaps failed for 199.17.139.254, reason: Course not initialized for ... domain winona access bre


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Nathan Moore, PhD

Professor, Physics and Engineering
Winona State University
Minnesota’s South-East Coast