TOTKat: (hand coded) online journal of a girl geek since April 1999.
WARNING: contains personal opinions. A sense of perspective is required when reading.

Troubleshooting horde and horde modules

Errors or omissions, please mail to documentation@totkat.org.

There are really literally hundreds of points of failure for horde, but I'll go through a few pointers here. You can always Google for stuff if you hit trouble. Most of the returned pages will be either at http://www.horde.org/ in the admin FAQ, the troubleshooting section of the FAQ, the mailing list archives, or at Thomas Willert's pages (these are Red Hat specific(ish)).

Anyway, here are some basic starting points to work from:-

• Enable logging with fetchmail, test again and check the fetchmail logs:- /var/log/fetchmail.log - this will give you ideas about whether there is a problem with the configuration of fetchmail or other general problems.



• Check the supplied test page for horde:- http://myhordeserver.com/horde/test.php - this tells you about versions, capabilities and any possible deficiencies in your installation. It also links to IMP and PHP info/tests.



• Check the supplied test page for IMP:- http://myhordeserver.com/horde/imp/test.php - this tells you about versions, any possible deficiencies and lets you test a login to IMP.



• Check the supplied test page for PHP:- http://myhordeserver.com/horde/test.php?mode=phpinfo - this tells you about versions, capabilities, settings and configuration of PHP for your installation.



• Check that IMAP is working:- telnet localhost 143 - if your IMAP isn't working, check the library linkage and whether imapd is actually runnning.



• Check that PHP is working:- create a file, $DOCROOT/phpinfo.php which contains the single line: <?php phpinfo() ?> and point your browser at http://myhordeserver.com/phptest.php



• Check that apache is working:- point your browser at http://myhordeserver.com/. You should get a page saying that apache is working. If not, check that the httpd is running and that the port number in $APACHEHOME/conf/httpd.conf is the port you expect to see your web server running on.



• If you're running your web server on a port other than 80, you may need to fiddle in $DOCROOT/horde/lib/Horde.php and edit the line 290, to change the server_name to HTTP_HOST :-

    $server_name = $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_HOST'];
  	

  and comment out the part that looks for the port number, lines 301 to 305:-

    /*             if ($server_port != 80 && $server_port != 443) {
                    $server_name .= ':' . $server_port;
                }
    */
  	

  It's a bit of a hack, but it works for me.



• Check the database password in the $DOCROOT/horde/$MODULE/config/conf.php for the module with the problem.



• Verify that you can log into the database from the command line.

    mysql -u root -p
  		

  You should get prompted for a password.



• Check that the database and tables exist.

    mysql -u root -p
  		

  You should get prompted for a password. Then connect to the horde database and run a couple of queries.

    connect horde;
    select * from horde_prefs;
  		

  That should dump out a load of preferences data. If the database doesn't exist, you need to create it!



• Check the web server logs in $APACHEHOME/logs. Skim through the access and error logs for lines referencing horde or the module with the problem. Also, check for general errors and problems.



• Watch web server logs in $APACHEHOME/logs. Try to access your installation and have another terminal with a tail -f of access_log and/or error_log. Keep an eye on what the server is being asked for and whether that matches what you think it should be being asked for.

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