Squirrel Mail Install Script Hangs

I noticed once of the domains I'm about to transfer has Squirrel Mail installed, so I attempted to install it on my test domain to make sure that all the appropriate modules and packages are installed to run the application before I transfer the domain.

The install script manages to download the packages from the web just fine, but then hangs on the installation step:

Found http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net:80/sourceforge/squirrelmail/squirrelm... in cache .. Found http://scripts.virtualmin.com:80/set_user_data-1.0.tar.gz in cache ..

Configuring Apache PHP settings .. .. already done. Now installing SquirrelMail version 1.4.20 ..

I let it sit there for about 10 minutes, and there appears to be no movement in the installation.

it appears to have placed all the files in the public_html/squirrelmail directory, however, visiting the website gives the following:

ERROR: Config file "config/config.php" not found. You need to configure SquirrelMail before you can use it.

This is CentOS 5.5 with the Bleeding Edge PHP packages installed.

Thoughts?

Status: 
Closed (fixed)

Comments

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If you SSH into the system while the install is running and run the top command, can you see any process (like conf.pl) using up a lot of CPU time?

Sorry it took so long to respond.

When I log in and look for running commands while waiting for squirrelmail to install, there are no processes sitting eating CPU. The box appears to be more or less completely idle.

Is there any update to this? One of my users had a problem with his SquirrelMail installation today, and attempted to reinstall it, and the same thing happened for him.

This one is hard to debug, as I can't re-produce it myself on our test systems.

Does it happen every time you install squirrelmail, or just occasionally?

Every time. Since migrating to the new server I have been unable to install squirrelmail on any domain, whether migrated from the old server or created on this server.

If you want, I'll enable the support login and you can check it out on my system.

Yes, a support login would be really useful - that way I can see what is going wrong under the hood.

Okay, I've set up the support login. The server is server.infinite-monkeys.com.

I setup a test domain for your use: testdomain.tauvix.com

I verified that the issue presents itself, and then reset the domain back to defaults.

I tried an install from the command line, and noticed that it logged the error :

Error: Failed to open /dev/pts/6 : No such file or directory

this indicates that TTY allocation using Webmin's built-in code is failing. To fix this, I installed the IO::Tty perl module with :

yum install perl-IO-Tty

and the Squirrelmail install now works fine.

Ah. That makes sense. I've discovered a couple of pty related issues since moving to the Xen virtualized platform.

Thanks for the help!

What's odd is that I haven't seen this issue on my test systems, even those using Xen. It may be some obscure kernel configuration issues..

I'm hosting with linode.com, and I'm using their kernel rather than the "Stock" one, because it has the paravirtualized drivers activated.

I know that at one point I was having trouble using screen because of a /dev link missing, then they did an update release of the kernel and I rebooted and no longer had the issue.

I wonder if we're just running into something like that again.

I might open a ticket with them in regards to all of the /dev/pts/* entries being missing.

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.