Topic: Need Help with 1st time album install...

[2Serve]

[Mike Bobbitt]

Hi 2serve,

Thanks for the detailed description. Looks like you've got everything right!

Would you be willing to send me the URL (and maybe your debug code) so I can check it out? I'm sure it's something simple, but as far as I can tell, you've already checked everything!

Cheers

[2Serve]

[Mike Bobbitt]

I think I got it... In you config, you have:

create_html_flag=1

That puts album.pl into a special mode where it'll create HTML files for the album, though it kind of "breaks" things for viewing. Set it to:

create_html_flag=0

And see what happens...

Cheers

[2Serve]

Well, actually it was originally set to 0 Mike and it was not working.  I only recently changed it to 1 to see if it would make things work and it did not. But I did change directories around since then also, so maybe I moved something into place.

I will change it back to 0 and see if that helps.  Stay tuned and I will post back ASAP.

[2Serve]

Okay, I turned off the create_html_flag setting it back to 0.
I now am back to seeing all white screens (no more colored panel presentations like your sample sites show), with blank album and picture frames.  It now also opens the albums when I click on them, however all the pictures are still blank squares on the page.  The filenames are all showing next to each picture and it shows the (rate it) titles, but no picture!

Anything else could be wrong?  Can it be my apache server config might be blocking jpeg files somehow?  I know the IE6 browser can show jpeg files since I do it all the time.  something still fishy here with my setup.

[Mike Bobbitt]

Hmmm. I see it's a bit better, but still has a problem...

According to the config, there should be a photo here:

http://xxxxx.com/album/Sony%20F55/Dsc01516.jpg

But when I go there, it's not found. Likewise, the icons should be here:

http://xxxxx.com/cgi-bin/images/thmb_album_folder.gif

But not so. Even going to this URL shows a forbidden:

http://xxxxx.com/cgi-bin/images

So it may be permissions on that dir, but your "album" dir just isn't showing up:

http://xxxxx.com/album

Gives a 404. Once you get that URL to respond, you should be in business...

(Note, I changed the URLs for your privacy. )

[2Serve]

That is correct on the directory contents, all the stuff is there in the right directories.  It is strange that the program has access to read it, yet it won't display (read it)?
I just for the heck of it went and gave full share priviledge to that entire pathname (all of the folders mentioned) and tried to run album again... no go.  Still shows blank pictures but with all the descriptive text info there.
Weird.  I was thinking it to be some kind of priviledge related deal too.  Does apache server need to be told in its config somewhere to allow passing of bin jpg files from certain directories?  I really never looked into the details of configuring apache yet.  I just installed it a day before I installed your album image server.  Maybe apache causing the prob?

I really would like to get this nice piece of work of yours going!

Keep chipping away at it (as will I from my end) and Thanks again for the support effort you are providing!

[2Serve]

Mike, I got it to show pictures finally!  But for some reason still, it does not show the thum icons and buttons or whatever.   I got it to work by changing the album_web= setting to blank unassigned.  Then all of a sudden my pictures started loading on the screen and I can see them now.

I still cannot see the thums icons though.  I moved the thum nails images directory up and out of the cgi-bin subdirectory so that it is no in apache2/images and no longer in apache2/cgi-bin/images.  This is because my apache error log was showing error messages for the thumnail.gif accesses saying that the file is not an executable file type!  Apparently apache thinks it should be an executable file since it is stored in the cgi-bin tree.

anyway, now I know it is somehow a flaky directory structure or path related quirk.  Any ideas how now to set album to pick up the thums and style sheets screen settings again?

I may try turning on that create_html_index=1 again now, to see what happens.  (but I think OI tried this combo before and it failed).

[2Serve]

Nope turning on create_html_flag=1 again just caused it to go south again (meaning it did not load nor display my pictures).

I turned that flag off and pictures came back on again.  Looks like I won't be able to use that feature.  Also, when the flag is on, it shows the nice screen style (grey background and all) but when I turn the flag on, it does not seem to use the style screen. But the pictures show up.  

No matter, I think you may have to investigate these parts of the code for these quirks under Windows XP.  I don't know if they occur under UNIX or AIX systems since I have not tried it on those OS.  But since no one else seems using UNIX based OS seem to be reporting it, maybe it is just under Windows.

anyway, please do let me know if you find out why I am getting these symptoms on WinXP.  Hope you can fix and perfect it for WinXP!

It's a great nifty software package otherwise! :-)

Thanks!

[Mike Bobbitt]

Glad to hear you're making progress.

I run it on both Linux and WinXP with no problems. To be honest, it seems like your Apache server is a bit whacked. Cleaing out album_web means you're using image shrouding, which indicates that your images were never viewable through the web.

Since you've created an "album" dir under your web root, you should be able to go to http://myserver.com/album and have it throw something up (even a forbidden would be OK). But it throws a 404, so your web server just isn't config'd right somehow.

I'd focus on getting that to work, and when you solve that, album.pl will be able to display the images...

Cheers

[2Serve]

Okay Mike, Thanks alot for the pointers.  I will look into the Apache server configuration and see what I can make of it.
Hopefully it will be a httpd.conf setting that needs to be changed to allow viewing of the directories.

Thanks again for a great piece of work and for the support forum to go with it!

[Mike Bobbitt]

Actually I had another thought. When you first install the album, it suggests "album_web=http://server.com/album" for you to use, but that may not be right. Clearly you have album_dir right, because the directory structure is showing up. So it's album_web that's wrong. You either need to get http://server.com/album responding, or change album_web to whatever the right URL to your /apache2/album directory is...

[2Serve]

Mike, I fired up my album server today at home.  Went to work and accessed the page(s).  All the picture album icons showed up and all seemed to be working fine until I tried to click on an album of over a hundred low resolution pictures.  I guess my work network gateway (with tons of security measures and firewalls builtin) really slows down the picture loading process!  It never completed and for some reason timed out with a TCP error related I think to "timed out" or not responding due to network congestion.  Hmmmmm.  Fine,
but after that I lost total connectivity to the dump Apache service!  I cannot even get into the machine anymore!  So I will have to wait until I get home to reset the server.  I have no idea what caused the lockup... album behaviour or flaky Apache server software behaviour.  Nevertheless, that server is locked up for now and won't respond to anything.  Sheesh!

Also, I think you are right about the Apache server not allowing access to the album directories. Last night I copied the thumbnail images (your originally named  img), to the directory Apache server allows for document access. Before my server died on me, I had simply typed in the URL pointing to that images directory and it did indeed list an index to my browser of all the thumbnail file contents!  But when I tried to browse the same images file in the apache2/images path where album.pl uses, I get a page access error that it is not there.  So, indeed, it seems to be an Apache config issue and not the album software.

However, I don't have any idea at this moment as to why and what locked up my server machine after trying to browse one of my larger picture albums this morning.  Even if the network was slow in transferring the pic files and timed out, that should not have knocked out and locked out the apache server!  I think the apache server code is flaky now.  Oh well,
learning curve(s)...

Thanks for everything!

[Mike Bobbitt]

Ouch. This server goes down sometimes, but it's almost always the firewall I have in front of it getting overloaded and failing...

I have very little experience with Apache on Windows (I use IIS for variety ) so I really have no idea what it might be.

Sounds like you're making progress though!