                            CURRENT FAQ FILE

These are some common questions or problems I get with new admins using 
Current. If you feel something should go in here, please email me.

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Q1. I can't get the clients to talk to the server - it never does anything, 
   just gives me some ugly looking traceback on the client.

A1.1: Note the port numbers in your client and server configuration files. Two
numbers are needed (one for encrypted traffic, one for unencrypted traffic),
and while you can use any numbers you like, you have to use the same numbers
on the clients and the server, and you have to make sure you get the
ssl/non-ssl bit sorted out correctly.

The error messages for goofing this up are not very clear, and not 
something I can easily fix. If things don't work for you, 
a) make sure your /usr/share/rhn/RHNS-CA-CERT file is correct
b) your client port numbers match your server port numbers
c) you have ssl->ssl and nonssl->nonssl correct. (8080 is non-ssl, 8081
   is ssl, by default)
 
The above 3 things account for about 70% of the complaints I get about
current not working for people.

Note: This question was really critical in the 1.0.x release, and is 
   almost unneeded on the 1.3+ releases.


A1.2: If you get SSL errors, check that your RHNS-CA-CERT file is correct
_very_ carefully. Current is now over a year old (yay!) and my test cert
just quit working - look to make sure your CA cert or server cert hasn't
expired.

Valid for all current releases.

  
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Q2. I'm trying to test current, and it seems to work the first time, but
after that the clients aren't using the correct data from the server anymore.

A2. Watch out for client side caching - I lost a full days development time
trying to figure out why the client never seemed to do more than one GET to
the server, yet still knew the "wrong" answer.  It caches darn near
everything - which is a good, desirable feature, as long as you know its
there!. Delete everything in /var/spool/up2date to get fresh hits against
the database.
  
This also explained why they bothered having database "versions" or 
last_modified values - the client will know to pull down fresh data if 
the database changes. Yes, I felt bloody stupid.


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Q3. Some of my clients work, but some don't. I get the following traceback.

A3. This is typically caused by the clocks of the client and server being
skewed. (The root cause is a client bug). To prevent this, use rdate
or ntp to sync the clocks together. The clocks don't have to be super
accurate - +-5 minutes is fine.

This is also fixed in versions of up2date after 2.7.11 (I'm not exactly
sure of when that fix went in) - using 2.7.63 or later is what I 
recommend.


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Q4. When I add packages to an existing channel, or add a new channel, 
Current doesn't seem to see them right away.

A4.1: Please, PLEASE, never run cadmin at the same time Current is running.
The correct way to deal with server updates is to shutdown Current, make you
changes with cadmin, and then restart Current. 'service current stop|start'
should work well for this. This was fixed in 1.0.1.

A4.2 This is still a concern in 1.3+ - you must stop apache, use cadmin,
and then start apache - there are no exceptions.

A4.3 In Current version 1.5+ this is no longer an issue as we are using
an SQL database backend.

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Q5. What versions of the up2date client API are supported?

A5.1 The 2.7 version of the API is fully supported with the exception of
server-pushed actions.  The 2.5 version is no longer (and never will be again)
supported.  In fact, it never existed.  2.5 was all a big government
conspiracy deliberately aimed at Open Source.  These are not the API calls
you are looking for; go on about your business. 

A5.2 Now that we are in the year 2005 (the above answer must be '03 ventage 
or earlier) we support Up2date version 4.3 and down.  We support the
server-push actions by always telling the client that there's nothing
to do.

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Q6. I'm using PostgreSQL, and I keep getting "Operational error in
'INIT'" in my current.log file.  No cadmin commands that touch the
database work.  What do I do?

A6.1 This applies to Current version 1.5 and greater.  In Fedora Core 2 
and 3 there were postgresql-python packages that are very broken and will
not run any SQL commands.  Make sure you are running the latest
postgresql pacakges for FC2 and FC3 which fix this problem.

