Salient Soft

This follows on from my previous post here.

Addition of a USB extender

As before, the mobile router performed around 4 times faster in the wooden garden office than in the brick build house, so it made sense to locate the router there when in use. However, I still wanted to allow shared internet around the house and on wifi when using the backup, and doing this another way e.g. by trying to share the connection from a windows PC in the garden office was not straightforward, and prevented the features of the Fritz box like its wifi from being used. I therefore obtained an EZCOO 50m USB extender for this, to allow the mobile router to still be connected to the Fritz Box in the house, but located in the garden office. When initially connecting the EE router to my TV PC via the USB extender, I received errors like “The last USB device you connected to this computer has malfunctioned and windows doesn’t recognize it”. Initially This appeared to be cable length related, as if it was a data corruption issue, as it failed on a full run to garden office with generous 7m flex cable at garden end. The full run was likely around the 50m max that was quoted by the EZCOO usb extender. However, this can also be caused by usb driver related issues. I tried to shorten the run by using the shortest cables I could each side of the Cat6 SWA run to the garden office. After this tidying up and retrying, the EE mobile router connected ok.

Significantly, I also received this error when testing the connection with my S22 Ultra mobile, again over the extender. However, when switching to using an older IOCELL Netdisk backup disk via its USB2 connection, it connected fine, which would tend to point more to driver or usb compatibility issues. Crucially, the Netdisk was able to copy significantly sized files both ways successfully over the full distance, indicating that the USB extender was working fine. Also and importantly, connecting the mobile router via the extender to the Fritz Box worked fine – the fritz box did not complain and always connected, but as always generally takes several minutes to switch over correctly between the primary and backup provider.

I continued to try file copying tests over the EE router connected to the TV PC via the extender, and these were all successful including 2-3GB copies to and from a OneDrive share. One issue that muddied the waters a lot was Windows file system caching of data both under Windows and with OneDrive – this led me to think copying had been completed when it hadn’t, or when a cache had been used to avoid the copy. Once I eliminated these issues all the tests were fine.

After retesting again today I had no problems connecting or speed testing, including tests done with the mobile router connected to the Fritz Box. I have had an occasional issue where speed test upload test did not work at all. I think that this may be a general ee mobile contention issue and perhaps if the upload link is too slow, ookla speed test just doesn’t bother and gives up.

DNS Issues

During the last couple of days, DNS has not been an issue with Zen overrides set, or by leaving the provider defaults. DNS still seems like it might be an issue, so it may be necessary to try another free public override on the DNS. The top rated free public servers are generally Cloud, Google, and OpenDNS, and details of these may be found on TechRadar here or on Broadband Genie here.

Points re topup and sim expiry

The terminology and process on this was not entire clear initially:-

• Firstly you need to purchase more credit, using a credit card, via ee.co.uk/topup . This can be done from any internet connection, by entering the mobile router phone number twice to authenticate (you don’t need a password to do this). The number was not listed in the paperwork for the router so I wrote it down on the paperwork for convenience.
• After you top up, i.e. buy credit, you need to visit add-on.ee.co.uk/purchase to get additional data using the credit you just purchased. Note that the word ‘purchase’ in the url here is ambiguous as you have already made a purchase with a credit card – you are just cashing in your credit to buy data. Note that in order to do this stage, your PC must be directly connected to the mobile router, i.e. you cannot be connected via the fritz box, even when it is in backup mode with the mobile router active. You get a choice of sizes, and you must have purchased enough credit previously to cover the size you want.
• In addition, it appears that there is a 6 month sim expiry issue for the PAYG sim used in the mobile router, as per here. You need to not just use the mobile router but also spend money every 6 months (180 days) or the SIM expires and you also lose any credit you had. You can phone EE to recover an expired SIM as detailed here, but if after 273 days you have done nothing, the sim and number expire completely and you will need a new sim and number. Therefore I decided my best option if not needing the backup for extended periods is to use it around twice a year before the 180 days expires, and buy the minimum minutes package (which is £5 at the time of writing).

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I obtained an EE mobile router as backup for the occasions when my main FTTC internet goes down. The main internet went down recently for and extended period due to an OpenReach Fibre connection issue to the exchange.

EE have the best mobile data coverage for my area per the ofcom coverage site here.

Zen internet sent me an EE mobile router as backup during the above outage (I presume they knew that EE had the best coverage in my area).

I was able to readily plug the router into a PC and get mobile coverage.

However, doing this via my Fritzbox 7530 needed some tweaking. The fritzbox has mobile internet backup capability via a submenu on its internet menu. This allows enabling the mobile router (plugged in via its usb port) as a backup only when the main internet is down.

Initially when I tried this having unplugged the main DSL connection, the internet showed as up, but DNS translation did not work. I found that under the internet menu/Account Information/DNS Server settings, I had overridden the DNSV4  servers provided by the ISP with specific Zen ones. Once I returned this setting to “use DNSv4 servers assigned by the internet service provider (recommended)”, DNS then worked on the mobile connection. In addition, automatic failover to mobile worked correctly when I unplugged the DSL connection, although this did take a few minutes to stabilise and was not instant.

In practice, I planned not to leave the mobile router plugged in, but to connect when needed. However, the fact that it is capable of providing shared internet and wifi via the router to my whole network was a real plus.

I found that the EE mobile router performed particularly well from my garden office (which is of wooden construction). I obtained approx 50Mb down and 1 Mb up in this situation – the down link speed was actually better than my FTTC which is around 32Mb. However in the house via the Fritzbox 7530, this reduced to around 20Mb down, presumably due to the brick construction blocking the signal more than the wooden building did.

However, in both of these situations the mobile data rate was way better than I had previously obtained by tethering my Vodafone Mobile – in the latter case, the connection was very slow and intermittent – sometimes I could not get a connection at all, so it would have been no use as a backup for remote working. The EE mobile router was perfectly suited for use as a remote working backup, although I planned not to leave it plugged in permanently as a hot backup but to manually plug in when required, as it was not instant anyway, and in practice I may have to buy additional minutes from EE as they seem to expire if you don’t use them within a set period.

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Update 18/10/2019 – file permission issue after unzip of new version

I upgraded to 2.22.1.  When the install zip was unzipped on the server, all the files and directories had group write access. This was not the case for previous installs/upgrades, and I was not clear on the cause.
This causes the upgrade script to fail, as the version of PHP in use disallowed the scripts from running with this permission present.

To remedy this I tried changing the permissions a directory at a time in the CPanel file manager but this was very time consuming.

I then tried to connect via SSH to the CPanel hosting, but this failed and timed out. It should be possible to enable it in Cpanel as per here but the Zen CPanel does not have this and does not seem to allow it.
The Zen support boards did not have anything on this either.

In the end I found that FileZilla can do it as per this post here.
It can recurse subdirectories, and also crucially all the check boxes are tri-state so they can either be “force on“, “force off“, or “leave as was“, so I could use the same recurse to fix both directories and all files to remove group write but leave everything else alone, given that other directory permissions are different to those of files and I didn’t want to mess with them.

This worked fine, and allowed the Mantis install script (which also does upgrades) to run.

When upgrading, the script helpfully does a precheck of requirements for the upgrqade. It said that a db type in the config script of ‘mysql’ was legacy and not supported in the zen configuration, so it said to change this to ‘mysqli’ in the config_inc.php file.
This then passed all the prechecks and the upgrade ran quickly and cleanly.

Original Version

This is fairly straight forward (apart from the database permissions issue below) and is documented here.

For additional information about initial installation of MantisBT see here.

The steps I performed were as follows:-

1. Backup the site including the MySQL databases
2. Rename the existing Mantis installation on the site to another folder for easy backout.
3. Upload the installation zip to the site, and unzip.
4. Rename the unzipped directory to the desired target name (in my case, mantis)
5. Copied the config_inc.php from the old installation to the new one. Note that in my case the config had been moved in the new version to a config subfolder under the installation directory.
6. Compared the copied config_inc.php with the sample one in config_inc.php.sample, to reconcile any config changes in the new version. In my case, going from version 1.2.4 to version 2.1.0, I had to add an entry for $g_crypto_master_salt which was not present in the old version. To create the salt I used the WordPress salt creation site here as Mantis did not have a convenient one, and it was not straightforward to create a random salt under windows.
7. Run the database upgrade script (see note below about permission issues).
8. I also used the Directory Privacy option under cPanel to force a username and password to allow access to Mantis (in addition to the login that Mantis provides). Note that when renaming the existing Mantis installation in step 2/ the existing directory privacy settings moved with the renamed directory.

Database fails to upgrade database due to permission errors

This was found when upgrading from 1.2.4 to the latest version at the time, 2.1.0.Running the upgrade database script gave errors on alter table commands, even though the user for that particular hosted database had full permissions. The solution was to use the overall master account for database access, which allowed the script to run. This is described in more detail here.

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cPanel MySQL access is provided by the phpMyAdmin application.

When creating MySQL databases for different applications, each get their own database schema and user, but their is also a master user which has the same username and password as the cPanel hosting (in my case, swoodley/…..).

This is relevant as I have found during upgrading some hosted software where a database upgrade script needs to be run, sometimes the script fails when run under the username for the specific schema with permission errors e.g. on alter table, even though the user has full permissions. This occurred in particular when upgrading Mantis BT. This appears to be because the script in question contains specific database schema references when referring to tables, of the form mydb.tablename. This kind of reference fails when run using the login account for the particular database schema.

Logging in using the master user solved the problem. It may be that modifying the script to take out specific schema references may then allow it to work with the schema/database account rather than the master one. However, this was not necessary in my case.

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