Can't save nodes (maybe server related)
Hi Everyone
I have an error with no clue how to solve it and I’m at wits end.
Problem: Can’t save an interactive node. When I hit save, the page clears and go back to the add form. I encountered the problem with Course presenter. If I put one single text box with plain text on the first page in the presenter I can save it, if I add anything else it returns to the add form and clears.
Background: Everything worked perfectly three weeks ago, when I last added nodes with Course presenter. This tells me it must have been an update somewhere in the system that has created the problem. Except for updates, I have not made any changes.
System: We run a VPS with WHM/cPanel. The VPS has a total of five different Drupal 7 installations, latest version. Each Drupal installation has a multisite configuration with 3-8 multisite per Drupal installation. All of them uses H5P. All of them are up to date with modules and core. All of them have the same problem.
We can add other nodes, like blog page, basic pages and article pages.
We use seven different base themes on the sites – since all are affected it doesn’t seems to be theme related.
The five installations have very different configurations. Two have commerce, one uses Organic Groups, two uses Groups, one has a very specific configuration with an integration of TNG (Genealogy server software) and MediaWiki. All of them uses Views, half of them uses Panels and some of them uses Display Suite. In other words; there are very few modules (except the basic ones) that’s consistent in all sites. Since they all have the same problem, I doubt it’s a module issue.
Most of the sites are multi-lingual, English and Swedish. Haven’t found any recent updates that can cause the problem here.
There has been several cPanel updates, I have gone through all the change logs, can’t find anything that’s related to this.
I don’t get any error logs. In Drupal I get a notice that there is an undefined variable in page.tpl.php. There has been no changes in the page.tpl.php for month and the same goes for variables declarations, so this doesn’t really help me. This message only occurs when I save an edited page.
So I’m at wits end. As I see it, it’s four possible areas where the issue can occur:
- The H5P module
- Another depending module or conflicts between modules
- Drupal in itself
- Server configuration changed by an update (we have done no manual changes to the server)
Anyone having any ideas where to go next? Or stumbled into something similar. Greateful of any help or ideas I can get.
Catharina
icc
Wed, 04/19/2017 - 10:36
Permalink
Hi Catharina, I'm sorry to
Hi Catharina, I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing this issue. I can't say that I've heard of anything similar. It sounds like Drupal isn't receiving any of the post data.
Have you tried saving in another browser or from another computer?
Have you checked both your 'recent log messages' in Drupal and your web server's error_log file? Note that it may be configured to log in different files for different sites.
Try opening your browser's console (Ctrl+Shift+J in Chrome) and then check off the 'Preserve log' option. Try reloading the form and then save again – see if you're getting any error messages in red.
Check your php.ini and make sure that the post_max_size is set higher than 8M.
I'm sure there's a natural explanation for the issue you're seeing, we just need to find it.
Catharina TCM
Mon, 04/24/2017 - 15:50
Permalink
Problem solved
Thanks for your reply Icc. I haven’t used the preserved log option in Chrome and that gave me a clue to the problem. It’s solved, so if anyone else encounter it, this is how.
When posting I got a Forbidden 403 error in the Chrome log. No other log error, neither in Drupal nor on the server. The error only occurred when saving a text in Course presenter with a text attribute in the full-html-category, like a color. The page was redirect back to the edit page.
cPanel update 64.0 has a Mod security update; OWASP mod security Core rule set W3.0. This is a recommended update from cPanel, has approx. 25 different configuration files. The update is supposed to minimize attacks on the server. I haven’t figured out which setting caused the problem, but disabling the entire ruleset solved the issue.
So, our sites are working as they are supposed to. If I can figure out which rule did create the issue, I will post it here. Server configuration isn’t my strongest side and if anybody knows the exact rule that might have caused this, I hope you post it.
Catharina
icc
Mon, 04/24/2017 - 16:11
Permalink
That's great to hear, thank
That's great to hear, thank you for sharing!