Forum Problems Installing LAMS: Re: 404 error

On the login page, there is a "news" section that is populated from a separate file. This allows administrators to create their own news for their LAMS site. However in LAMS 2.0, when the file can't be accessed for some reason, it breaks the login page.

My guess is that on your installation, it can't access the news file properly. I suspect that the problem will be the setting for the server url.

When you installed LAMS, the installer asks you for the server url by which LAMS will be accessed. I think it defaults to http://localhost:8080/lams/. What did you set it to? You must whatever address you entered there to access LAMS.

If you can't remember what you entered, go into a MySQL client, go to the LAMS database, find the lams_configuration table and look at the entry for ServerURL.  If you don't have a nice GUI program to access MySQL, you can do it from the command line:

C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin>mysql -u lams -p
Enter password: ********
Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 73 to server version: 5.0.24a-community-nt-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use lams2
Database changed
mysql> select * from lams_configuration where config_key = "ServerURL";
+------------+-----------------------------+
| config_key | config_value                |
+------------+-----------------------------+
| ServerURL  | http://localhost:8080/lams/ |
+------------+-----------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)



If this value ISN'T http://localhost:8080/lams/ then the login page may throw this error.  The value in the database must match the one you enter in the browser. So if you want to access your server as http://lams.someschool.edu.au:8080/lams/ then you should put "http://lams.someschool.edu.au:8080/lams/" as the value in the database.

If the ServerURL setting is wrong, then you will need to correct it directly in the database (as you can't login successfully and do it using the system administrator screen).

You can use a statement like the following in your mysql client. Or reinstall LAMS and make sure you enter the URL correctly.

update lams_configuration set config_value="http://myserver:8080/lams" where config_key = "ServerURL";

Post back here if this doesn't fix it.

Fiona

p.s. We will make the login page more robust in the next version - ie if it can't access the news file then the news will be missing but the login page will still work. Then this problem will be easier to fix. But you won't want to wait till the next release just to fix this.

Posted by Fiona Malikoff