Common Installation Errors: manual chapter feedback and discussion

Feedback on the following chapter: https://www.phplist.org/manual/ch033_common-installation-errors.xhtml

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Hello,

Please add to this documentation page that another common cause of the 500 Internal Server Error is from the random_compat library. The solution here is to install libsodium.

I encountered this issue on CentOS 7 with apache v2.4.6 and php v5.6.33.

The random_compat library included with phplist requires some source of entropy. For users like myself which use open_basedir in /etc/php.ini to limit which directories in which php is allowed to execute, php is not permitted to access /dev/urandom. The solution recommended by the developers of random_compat is to add /dev/urandom to open_basedir, but I felt that was probably a bad idea.

Instead, I decided to install libsodium and the pecl libsodium extension for php. Indeed, this is the preferred source of entropy for random_compat.

After I installed the libsodium package and the pecl libsodium extension (and restarted my apache webserver), the 500 errors went away, and I was able to proceed with the phplist installation in my web browser.

For more information about this issue and its fix, please see my write-up on it:

Thank you,

Michael Altfield
Senior System Administrator
PGP Fingerprint: 8A4B 0AF8 162F 3B6A 79B7 70D2 AA3E DF71 60E2 D97B

Open Source Ecology
www.opensourceecology.org
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1 Like

Thanks @maltfield, will do

@maltfield @samtuke I think that the β€œproblem” here is phplist causing a 500 error, instead of handling the case of not having an implementation of random_bytes().

This was raised a while ago https://mantis.phplist.org/view.php?id=18546

@maltfield A solution to the unhelpful 500 error has been provided via a code snippet from @duncanc in the mantis link above. Would you care to apply it via a pull request?

@samtuke sure, please see:

@maltfield Now merged. Thank you very much for your contribution!