Helping others with administrating Tine 2.0

To get help with their individual installation of Tine 2.0, admins may either sign a commercial Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the developers (the company behing the project is called metaways) or they ask other users for help. Since Tine 2.0 as a project is widely community driven, for my share I try support others to enable them to spread the word about Tine 2.0 (and after that to help, too).

I guess you're probably here because you asked for support in the forum at tine20.org. To make things faster please read the following details on how to get reliable help as fast as possible.

1. First aid

Sometimes something goes wrong. As you're trying around the failure goes away. That's what we all do mostely. Here are my top advices for a good guess (with reasonable risk in stake):

1. Check file permissions (on some systems like Red Hat disable SELINUX et al.) -- especially if you use Download/ZIP versions
2. Make sure all files have been unpacked and are on the right place even if you use a repository (compare to Download version)
3. Problems with updates, irrational behaviour: Delete cache (in cache's dir the folders starting with "zend_chache-x...") and check if all modules are updated. Deactivate the queue in setup.php during update. Make sure no concurrent process is running (e.g. mobile phones).
4. Problems with login: After deleting the cache try deleting the session files, too (currently logged in users will be logged out).
5. Felamimail stopped working for some users: Maybe the're was a problem that already went away but mail content is still cached. So clear Felamimail's cache.
6. Beginning with php 5.6: SSL-Certificates are taken and checked from system cert store; this affects self-signed certificates and requests to localhost or directly to the Server-IP. After upgrading php make sure your services are still reachable over SSL/TLS: Use curl to request the URL in question (curl can connect to IMAP, too) within the same environment as your Tine 2.0 installation is (curl and Tine 2.0 will check certificates against system storage).

If first aid doesn't help:

2. What and how to provide necessary information

Many questioner only provide a description of symptoms ("cannot log in anymore..."). That's usually not even enough for a wild guess if it is not a common and known problem. Error reporting and solving depends on your environment heavily.

a) System details

Please tell us within your first question:

• The Release (i.e. "Elena 2015.07.5") and the package (Download as ZIP, rpm or deb repository)
• The Webserver (i.e. Apache or nginx) and "Server API" (as module, fcgi, fpm, etc.)
• PHP-Version (i.e. php 5.4.22 as stated in Admin-module/server information)

b) Log-File

The most important source of information about your Tine 2.0 system is the log-file. You will need it at some point so set it up directly at the beginning (where's the file, permissions, etc.); deactivate it later when not needed anymore.

To get help or report any errors the log should be in level DEBUG (priority = 7).You may configure it in setup.php (recommended for beinners) or directly in the file config.inc.php:

'logger' => 
 array (
   'active' => true,
   'filename' => '/srv/www/tine20/tine20.log',
   'priority' => '7',
 ),

If log-file already exists make sure to remember where the crucial part begins (parallel threads can overlap). In an bigger environment at least filter for the watched user. If you're unsure post the whole output (if too long provide it as separate download file). Watch out for lines with level "ERR" (meanwhile you're level is "DEBUG") or for stack traces (typically around more than one line beginning with a sharp "#"). Each thread has its unique identifier (the first five characters) - keep things together...

There shouldn't be any passwords or other sensitive informations included. In very rare cases they are (i.e. encoded in base64), so whenever possible use a test account.

Notes: After you configured it, tested your environment and all went well, only deactivate it (keep the working settings for next time)! For further information see the FAQ in the wiki. Especially the chapter about filtering the log file is very useful.

3. My personal environment

I can support foremost within my own field of expertise, which is:

• Linux OS (Ubuntu 10.04 and recently Cent OS 7)
• Mail: established versions of Postfix and Cyrus, authentication in openldap
• Apache (2.2 and 2.4)
• PHP as fpm, version 5.4.16 plus opCache 7.0.5 plus redis session store
• Any recent Tine 2.0 from Download
• iOS and Android clients

Closing words

To avoid any misunderstanding: In my experience releases are not public beta (some folks suggested that). Although there's a Tine 2.0 business edition this doesn't mean that only this releases are tested and supported well. Infact I never used other version as the regular releases of the community project. I have a Tine 2.0 system running productive for years on different systems (and upgraded since), so I can confirm "it works as expected".

• I'm not affiliated with metaways in any terms,
• support is provided in spare time only and
• contact me me only in the forum, please.

Regards

Johannes