Topic: Reminders problem with Kronolith

[Amir Inbar]

Hi

I am relatively new on SME and I have installed Horde 3.1 and activated all of it's modules.
the problem i get is an e-mail is beeing send to me every 5 min. with this subject :

Cron <root@sme1> /usr/bin/php /home/httpd/html/horde/kronolith/scripts/reminders.php

the body contains this :

X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.9 Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1  

i have searched a way to dissable Reminders on Horde but didn't find it.

can anybody dirrect me to a solution please ?

[mrjhb3]

Kronolith needs the cli version of php to work properly.  With the CGI version you get the message you are seeing.  Reminders will still be sent, but you get that side effect.  I haven't found any other solution except to not use reminders with the php cgi version.

http://wiki.horde.org/KronolithReminders?Horde=89068dd5308a7d09bbbe9682288ad75&referrer=HowTo

JB

[Amir Inbar]

Thank you for the reply.
 From what i understand - i need to dissable the cron job that sends those emails.
i'll get in to it today and post the results.

[Amir Inbar]

hi again

I have read through the page you have linked here and this explains how to create a task to be run every 5 min.
my provlem is that there is one allready and i need to find it and dissable it.

i have found the reminders.php that resides in horde's path but i couldn't find the cron job that calls it.

i'll try searching the horde howto but i think it may be a cron - issue.

[Amir Inbar]

looked through hode site FAQ and documentation and couldn't find any way to dissable the reminders function.
there is also no way to change the timing of the sending of the reminders since SME uses cgi php and not CLI as horde requiers.

is there any way to workaround this problem ?

[mrjhb3]

hi again

I have read through the page you have linked here and this explains how to create a task to be run every 5 min.
my provlem is that there is one allready and i need to find it and dissable it.

That link also states:
Note: Your php executable must be the CLI version, it will NOT work with the CGI version. Do php -v to verify that you have the CLI version.

You don't state how you installed this, so you need to look in the various cron entries to find where the reminders are being executed.  That could be:
pwd
/etc
[root@test etc]# ls -ld cron*
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Apr  1 23:40 cron.d
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Jan 16 12:41 cron.daily
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Jul 19  2001 cron.hourly
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Dec 23 12:47 cron.monthly
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root         1347 Apr  8 01:12 crontab
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 Dec 23 12:47 cron.weekly

John

[Amir Inbar]

hi John

thank you for your patiance.
i have followed (your ?) post and downloaded all the rpms from

http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs//jbennett/sme7/horde/RPMS/
and then i did
rpm -Uvh *.rpm

it took me few min to understand that i need to log in to Horde as admin and complete the setup.

the reason i wanted to upgrade Horde to 3.1 is the outlook plugin - sync4j (and the new name - Fanambol) promises to (maybe) give me a real alternative to Exchange server.
I am running several SME servers at deferent locations and the option to be able to sync calanders and contacts is very important to me.
Sync4j and Fanambol require Horde 3.1.

[mrjhb3]

hi John

thank you for your patiance.
i have followed (your ?) post and downloaded all the rpms from

http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs//jbennett/sme7/horde/RPMS/
and then i did
rpm -Uvh *.rpm

it took me few min to understand that i need to log in to Horde as admin and complete the setup.

OK, so you have initially installed my add-on RPM's.  The Kronolith reminders cronjob is located at /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/crontab/hordereminders.  So, if you remove this file or remark out the cron entry, then re-expand /etc/crontab, then the reminders script will not run.

As for horde 3.1, greg swallow has created some work in progress base rpms located at http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs/gswallow/sme7/addons-testing/horde-3.1 .  The specific smeserver-xxx rpm's have not been created yet.  In my addons I have added the ability for the admin user to be able to login to webmail and go to setup.  By default noone is allowed.  So, when you login as admin and make any changes, then try to save them, you get an error because the admin can not write to the directory by default.  You have to cut and paste your changes in.  But, if you make any changes that expand any of the templates, then you lose what you have done.  I hope that makes sense.

I'm sure we will look at making the move to horde 3.1 after the GA release of SME 7.  I have briefly played with the 3.1 releases, but haven't really done any extensive testing.

JB

[cyberlair]

I have the exact same problem. Getting all kinds of reminders but I didn't notice until I had about 5000   in my mail box! I have since resolved this problem by removing reminders from the crontab and expanding the template.

It is still not clear to me why the new horde does not function? E.g calendar etc. How to I get this CLI installed rather than CGI? I have not found any documentation for installing CLI and getting this new horde to work.

[mrjhb3]

I have the exact same problem. Getting all kinds of reminders but I didn't notice until I had about 5000   in my mail box! I have since resolved this problem by removing reminders from the crontab and expanding the template.

It is still not clear to me why the new horde does not function? E.g calendar etc. How to I get this CLI installed rather than CGI? I have not found any documentation for installing CLI and getting this new horde to work.

Here is the response I got back from Johnny Hughes, when I asked if CentOS would be adding the CLI version of PHP.

RedHat will not add this feature to RHEL-3 or RHEL-4 ... it will be in
RHEL5.  See this link:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=137704

That means it will not be provided for centos 3 or 4 either.

There is a spec file change in that bug to be able to build a CLI
version.
---
So, you could try your hand at re-building the RPM and see if you can get the CLI version created.  Or, try to find which Fedora version has this implemented and see if those RPM's will work on SME7.  

I don't know PHP, so I can't tell you specifically why the CGI version doesn't work.  If you really need to know, then you could post a question on the Kronolith or php mailing lists and share your answer.  If it is that annoying to you to have all of those reminders, then remark out the crontab entry.  You can still use Kronolith, but won't get any reminders.  Which to me, defeats the purpose of using the calendar.  

Don't get me wrong, I would like for this to work as well, as I really don't want to use the work around either, but that is what I am doing.  I have set a rule in ingo to filter those reminder messages.

JB

[cyberlair]

Thanks for the info.

Well I was able to stop the reminders by removing the crontab entry to send the reminders.

But I'm confused as to why the kronolith rpm's were posted to use for SME 7 but they do not work. It appears without php CLI you cannot even add calendar entries at all. I get lots of errors if I try to add to the calendar.

I guess I will try and remove the kronolith rpm's and wait for CLI to be supported.

Thanks

[mrjhb3]

Thanks for the info.

Well I was able to stop the reminders by removing the crontab entry to send the reminders.

But I'm confused as to why the kronolith rpm's were posted to use for SME 7 but they do not work. It appears without php CLI you cannot even add calendar entries at all. I get lots of errors if I try to add to the calendar.

I guess I will try and remove the kronolith rpm's and wait for CLI to be supported.

Thanks

Well you are incorrect about your statement.  They do work.  I am using them now on my system.  I would not have posted them as contribs if they didn't work.

Once you install the rpm's did you do a signal-event post-upgrade ; signal-event reboot?  This needs to be done so that the mysql tables will be loaded properly.  Somewhere in my initial post to the devinfo list, I believe  I stated that this needs to be done.  Also, if you have a look at the rpm changelogs, you should see what changes had been made and any other comments I made as well.

If you are not satisfied with what is there and how it is currently working, then you can also re-build the RPM's to suite you.

JB

[cyberlair]

Hi. OK Well I downloaded all the rpm's and did a rpm -i Uvh *
Once complete I did do a signal-event post-upgrade ; signal-event reboot.

I can access the calendar but if I try to add something I get this error?

There was an error adding the event: DB Error: no such field : INSERT INTO kronolith_events (event_id, event_uid, event_creator_id, event_title, event_description, event_category, event_location, event_status, event_attendees, event_keywords, event_exceptions, event_modified, event_start, event_end, event_alarm, event_recurtype, calendar_id) VALUES ('6c5a21ee269c425f8d7d5510ae80fd2a', '20060426151720.46ox8xd9socg@www.cyberlair.net', 'jason@cyberlair.net', 'test', '', '', '', '2', 'a:0:{}', '', '', 1146079040, '2006-04-26 20:00:00', '2006-04-26 21:00:00', 0, '0', 'jason@cyberlair.net') [nativecode=1054 ** Unknown column 'event_uid' in 'field list']


Any ideas Thanks!

[mrjhb3]

Hi. OK Well I downloaded all the rpm's and did a rpm -i Uvh *
Once complete I did do a signal-event post-upgrade ; signal-event reboot.

I can access the calendar but if I try to add something I get this error?

There was an error adding the event: DB Error: no such field : INSERT INTO kronolith_events (event_id, event_uid, event_creator_id, event_title, event_description, event_category, event_location, event_status, event_attendees, event_keywords, event_exceptions, event_modified, event_start, event_end, event_alarm, event_recurtype, calendar_id) VALUES ('6c5a21ee269c425f8d7d5510ae80fd2a', '20060426151720.46ox8xd9socg@www.cyberlair.net', 'jason@cyberlair.net', 'test', '', '', '', '2', 'a:0:{}', '', '', 1146079040, '2006-04-26 20:00:00', '2006-04-26 21:00:00', 0, '0', 'jason@cyberlair.net') [nativecode=1054 ** Unknown column 'event_uid' in 'field list']


Any ideas Thanks!

Yeah, that is telling me that the kronolith tables do not seem to be present.  These tables are loaded during the mysql.init phase after bootstrap-console save is running.  Did you have any errors in your messages log about mysql.init?  If you don't remember, then you could do another post-upgrade and reboot and watch the messages log.

As far as your RPM command, I hope that is only a typo.  I install mine by doing RPM -Uvh *.rpm

John

[mrjhb3]

I have the exact same problem. Getting all kinds of reminders but I didn't notice until I had about 5000   in my mail box! I have since resolved this problem by removing reminders from the crontab and expanding the template.

It is still not clear to me why the new horde does not function? E.g calendar etc. How to I get this CLI installed rather than CGI? I have not found any documentation for installing CLI and getting this new horde to work.

cyberlair et all,

I have found a way to suppress the emails going to the admin.  In your crontab entry, change it to this:
*/5 * * * * root /usr/bin/php -q /home/httpd/html/horde/kronolith/scripts/reminders.php  
Notice the -q that runs the php file in quite mode.  Have a look at php -h for more details.  You can either modify the template to test or go here:
http://mirror.contribs.org/smeserver/contribs//jbennett/sme7/horde/RPMS/ and download the most recent updates that work with RC2.  The only things that have changed are the e-smith-horde modifications and the smeserver-kronolith that has the crontab change.

JB