[drupal-support] help

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

On Mon, 23 May 2005, Christopher Taylor wrote:

> 1. I had a question about a funny message that is shoing up on the front page.
> No matter what we do, it won't go away.
> It just says
> "?q=node
> N/A"

That's strange. Can we look at your site?

> 2. I did a rather round about install procedure because I am not
> familiar with sql and since I am blind, my screen reader doesn't
> work all that great in certain places.

Could you point out the places where it doesn't work? We are trying to
make Drupal and drupal.org as accesible as possible.

> My host provider has a script of 4.5.1 which they offer on the
> platform.  They didn't have 4.6 so I downloaded it and unpacked it
> in a new directory.  I did all the appropriate updates to the
> config.php file.
> I did an install of 4.5.1.

Hmm, are you trying to install 4.6 over a previously existing 4.5.1
install?

> Then, I ran update.php from 10-31-2004, the default.  It gave the
> severity error and so I ran the update again using the date of
> 01-07-2005. It seemed to solve the problem with the exception of one
> message about an "invalid argument call"

Can you put your database backup (you did make a backup, did you?) back
in place, run the update from 10-31-2004 and tell me which error you
got?

> Then I logged in and it gave me an error because I tried to create
> the first account.

If you did upgrade a 4.5.1 installation you would have already had that
account. If you on the other hand did a fresh 4.6.1 install you'd not
need to run the update script. What did you do?

> Apparently, it already had admin in there as the first record.
> Anyhow, it all cleared away and things were working fine until this
> strange node message.  This occurred when I tried submitting a test
> story. I change the name in the system from my name to another ain
> the "Author name" and it gave some error about the user not
> exsisting when I hit "submit".  Somehow, it took the submit but the
> story disappeared.  That is when the node error came up.  It showed
> the story in the log but there was no trace of the content.

It is difficult to say what happened. Drupal should not accept your
change if a user with the given name does not exist.

> 3. I tried to run a cron.php thinking it would fix something but it
> gave an error about a header a missing on line 66.

line 66 of which file? It is possible that you have an error in your
settings.php file.

> I guess the questions are
> 1. Do I have a possible unstable install?  How can I tell?
> 2. What is this strange ?q=node
> n/a that popped up after the problem with the story submit?  How do I make it go away?

> 3. Why am I getting an error on line 66 when I run cron.php?
>
> I am about to invest a lot of time in design and I still don't know
> exactly how to back up the database.

*ouch* You haven't made an update before making a database backup have
you? Does your hosting provider provide some wort of user panel such as
cpanel, plesk or similar? Those usually contain rather simple ways of
doing backups. If you have access to the the command line you can try:

mysqldump -u"your user name" -p"your password" "your drupal database" > backup.sql

> I have a lot of work to put in all the design and menus, etc.

I hope you didn't start yet. Your database might be screwed.

Cheers,
	Gerhard