We are currently working on a new distribution of LORLS (That’s right version 7 is coming soon) and to test the installer’s ability to update an existing installation we needed a fresh v6 install to test on.   So I dropped into a fresh virtual machine we have dedicated specifically to this kind of activity, downloaded the version 6 installer and ran through the installation only to find that, while it had created the database and loaded the initial test data just fine, it hadn’t installed any of the system files.

So for the next 3 hours I was scouring apache’s logs, checking the usual culprits for these sort of issues and debugging the code.  One of the first things I did was check the SELinux configuration and it was set to permissive, which means that it doesn’t actually block anything just warns the user.  This lead me to discount SELinux as the cause of the problem.

After 3 hours of debugging I finally reached the stage of having a test script that would work when run by a user but not when run by apache.  The moment that I had this output I realised that while SELinux may be configured to be permissive, it will only pick up this change when the machine is restarted.  So I manually tried disabling SELinunx (as root use the command ‘echo 0 > /selinux/enforce’) and then tried the installer again.

Needless to say the installer worked fine after this, so if you are installing LORLS and find that it doesn’t install the files check that SELinux is disabled.