Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

Wednesday, 23 June 2010 00:23 CDT

Tariaki

TEXTHi,

After installing Backup Pro, when I click Apply or Save after changing setting in Configuration I'm being 'thrown' to Joomla control panel and the settings are not saved.

I've installed Backup Pro on few other sites and it works fine. It's just this one :

http://www.naturalflooringukltd.co.uk

Any ideas?

Thanks

Wednesday, 23 June 2010 16:55 CDT

dlb

This may be related to the JQuery libraries that Akeeba uses. Let's start with the /media folder.

First, make sure that the media/com_akeeba directory, all of its subdirectories and all of the files contained therein have 0755 permissions (note: 0777 might not work, but 0755 is bound to work on the vast majority of servers).

If that fixes it, great. Otherwise we'll have to get Nicholas in on the problem.

Dale L. Brackin
Support Specialist

English: native

Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

????
My time zone is EST (UTC -5) (click here to see my current time in Philadelphia, PA)

Wednesday, 23 June 2010 22:45 CDT

Tariaki

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

All directories have 0755 permissions. All files have 0644 permissions.
Still won't work.

I've also noticed that when I click on Browse in Configuration (next to the temp and output settings) I get "The specified directory doesn't exist!" and the path to directory looks like that :
%2Fhome%2Fsites%2Fsoutheastovencleaners.co.uk%2Fpublic_html%2Ftmp

Strange....

Thursday, 24 June 2010 04:31 CDT

dlb

The invalid paths are a problem, but not the current problem. :) You can put "[DEFAULT_OUTPUT]" in the Output folder field and "[SITEROOT]/tmp" in the temporary folder field, both without the quotes. That will set both to the default locations, which should be valid.

I'll ask Nicholas to look at the configuration problem.

Dale L. Brackin
Support Specialist

English: native

Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

????
My time zone is EST (UTC -5) (click here to see my current time in Philadelphia, PA)

Friday, 25 June 2010 04:27 CDT

nicholas

This sounds like a Javascript conflict. Can you try using a different browser or - ideally- a different browser from a different computer?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 30 June 2010 06:39 CDT

Tariaki

Hi,

I tried it from a different computer with a different browser (I tried FF, Chrome and IE). Same problem....

Thursday, 01 July 2010 00:46 CDT

nicholas

Please go to your Joomla!'s back-end, then click on the Help, System Info menu item. Click on the PHP settings tab and tell me what is the setting of Magic Quotes, Disabled Functions, Mbstring Enabled and Iconv Available. Thanks!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 01 July 2010 00:58 CDT

Tariaki

Hi,

Here are my settings:

Safe Mode: Off
Open basedir: None
Display Errors: Off
Short Open Tags: On
File Uploads: On
Magic Quotes: Off
Register Globals: Off
Output Buffering: Off
Session Save Path: None
Session Auto Start: 0
XML Enabled: Yes
Zlib Enabled: Yes
Disabled Functions: None
Mbstring Enabled: Yes
Iconv Available: Yes
WYSIWYG Editor: Editor - No Editor

Thanks

Thursday, 01 July 2010 03:07 CDT

nicholas

Can you please PM me super admin login information for this site? I suspect that there is either a Javascript conflict or a very outdated Joomla! version, but I need to run my debugging tools on it.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 02 July 2010 04:21 CDT

nicholas

OK, I spent the last hour investigating this and I can say without any doubt that there's something broken with your server! Akeeba Backup issues POST requests to perform all of its actions, including saving the configuration and running a backup. Your server doesn't honour the POST request. Instead, it drops the POST data and issues a GET request.

I have also checked that the POST requests Akeeba Backup is sending to the server are well-formed. They do have the proper content type and encoding and the body of the data is URL-encoded as it should. I took several traces of com_content and com_akeeba and compared them side by side, but I couldn't see any problems.

Since your server is doing it only with Akeeba Backup, I suspect that there is a misconfigured security measure on your server (e.g. mod_security) which has a rule to filter POST data from requests containing "akeeba" in their name.

Do note that I can not switch Akeeba Backup to use GET requests because:
a. What your server is doing is not normal, it is actually against the standards
b. GET requests have a limited capacity (about 1024 characters, including the path to the index.php script) which means that most operations will fail due to overfloating this capacity.

At this point I'd suggest contacting your host about this issue and ask them to take a look and respond to us why their server is dropping the POST data from those requests and issues 301 redirects to the stripped URL.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Sunday, 04 July 2010 00:50 CDT

Tariaki

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks for your effort. Highly appreciated.

That's the response I got from Heart Internet support :

"We are not blocking any POSTs or requested for Akeeba. Also we are not aware of any issues on our servers which would change a POST to a GET request.

Can I ask exactly how the POSTs are being made are the using http? Can you also provide some instances of where this issue is occurring and some information which makes Akeeba think that this is occurring. It will allow me to look into this issue."

Sunday, 04 July 2010 01:15 CDT

nicholas

OK, we are doing the requests using standard HTTP protocol. The library used to perform the HTTP requests is jQuery. They can debug the connection problems, if they want, by visiting Akeeba Backup's Backup Now page on your site's back-end and tracing the requests from there. They'll see that the POST request gets transformed into a GET request, dropping all POST data. The same happens with all POST requests originating from Akeeba Backup.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 05 July 2010 13:39 CDT

Tariaki

Hi Nicholas,

Thanks once again.

I've forwarded your reply to the server support and got this :

I think the issue here will be the fact that the site is trying to do http request back to itself which we do not allow, as you cannot make loop back connections to the same server. If you want to connect to a file you need to use the full path rather than a http request.

The stange thing is that all my websites are hosted on their servers and at least one of them works fine (even the CRON).
I have PM you the login details to the one that works maybe you can find the problem by comparing.

Cheers

Tuesday, 06 July 2010 01:59 CDT

nicholas

Huh?! Are they serious? Where did they see that? Akeeba Backup does an HTTP post to Joomla!'s index.php page, which runs the component's backup step and returns JSON data regarding the outcome of the process. The PHP code doesn't try to include a file through HTTP, or access a file of the same site through HTTP. That would be stupid on my part and I know I don't do that anywhere in my code. All files are included using require_once which is given an absolute filesystem path. Can they provide evidence (e.g. TCP header traces) for this serious allegation, or are they shoveling BS in hope that we'll just forget about it?! The support guy just "thinking" that something is like this or that doesn't really help with resolving this issue, does it?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Sunday, 18 July 2010 11:54 CDT

user1494

Hiya. I have the same issue - on just one of 3 sites - and was wondering if you ever managed to resolve it? I can get around some of the issues by editing the database directly, but excluding folders is tricky this way!

Many thanks in advance.

Richard

Details:
Joomla 1.5.19
Akeeba 3.0 stable
If I change any parameters it drops me back to the main joomla backend page

Sunday, 18 July 2010 11:57 CDT

Tariaki

Hi,

Still no joy. I'm in a middle of a ping pong between Akeeba support and my host support. It looks like it's a host problem because so far they couldn't come with a good answer!
Waiting.

Cheers

Sunday, 18 July 2010 11:59 CDT

user1494

Thanks Tariaki. Hopefully knowing there's a second case might help. My hosting co is eukhost, just in case yours is too!

Sunday, 18 July 2010 12:13 CDT

user1494

A possible clue: if I'm in the "exclude folders" page and I try to exclude one, I get the following javascript error. Any help?

Webpage error details
User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.3)
Timestamp: Sun, 18 Jul 2010 22:05:10 UTC

Message: Access is denied.

Line: 112
Char: 287
Code: 0
URI: http://www.richardknightly.com/media/com_akeeba/js/jquery.js

Sunday, 18 July 2010 21:53 CDT

nicholas

Richard, your problem is much easier. The "Access is denied" means that you have permissions issues. Please give 0755 permissions to the media/com_akeeba directory and all of its included files and subdirectories, recursively. This should solve your problem. If there is still a problem, please PM Super Admin details so that I can log in to your sites and debug it on the spot. Thanks!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Monday, 19 July 2010 16:37 CDT

user12640

Hi guys.

Just for the record, my Akeeba Backup worked perfectly well, until I upgraded to the 3.0 stable, when the "unexisting directory" issue shows up. I fought a lot with it, because the path was not wrong.

Then I set the [DEFAULT_OUTPUT] and [SITEROOT]/tmp that dlb mentioned here, and that was it, worked again like a charm.

But, the very strange thing is that when I checked again to see what directory was set, I saw that it used the same I was writting before... (tha one that produced the error).

Regards.

Tuesday, 20 July 2010 01:13 CDT

nicholas

This is very strange. In 3.0 stable the use of variables like [DEFAULT_OUTPUT] should be "sticky", i.e. not replaced when you visit the Configuration page again. Can you please try the latest developer's release?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 20 July 2010 05:34 CDT

user12640

I tried the svn190 in the same server, and it was no problem detecting the Output and Temporary directories this time.

Tuesday, 20 July 2010 23:47 CDT

nicholas

Good to know. Thank you for testing!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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