Since we migrated to a new server, we have been facing a peculiar issue.
When logged in as a journal manager, when we log in as other users (editors, authors,section editors, etc.), we are unable to “logout as user” successfully. This issue occurs only on Chrome and Firefox, not on Internet Explorer (though, on one of our systems the issue occurs on IE as well).
All the other direct logins and logouts are working fine. This is only an issue when logged in as a user through the journal manager login.
We found this post on the OJS forum which describes a similar problem: http://pkp.sfu.ca:8083/support/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=7807
The post talks about a problem with APC on the server, which we asked our server providers about. They installed APC on the server for us, but this did not solve the issue.
Please see below the procedure that is generating this issue:
When logged in as a Journal Manager, on the User Home page, click on the Journal Manager link.
Under the “Roles” section, click on any one of the links, which will take you to a list of users that are enrolled under that role.
Click on the “Log in as” link for any of the users. This will log you in as that particular user.
Once logged in, you can access the different pages for that user.
In one session, the first time that you login as a user and then try to “log out as user” (link will be there in the right sidebar), the action is successful. But, in subsequent logins as a user, the “log out as user” action is unsuccessful.
My OJS version is upgraded 2.4.5 to 2.4.6 through patch. This version worked perfectly on our old server. The issue has occurred only after we shifted to the new server.
Our server providers sent us the following log. I don’t know if this will help.
[20-May-2015 13:25:09 UTC] ojs2 has produced an error
Message: WARNING: shell_exec() has been disabled for security reasons
In file: /home/user/public_html/lib/pkp/classes/core/String.inc.php
At line: 396
Stacktrace:
Server info:
OS: Linux
PHP Version: 5.4.40
Apache Version: N/A
DB Driver: mysql
DB server version: 5.5.42-cll
[20-May-2015 13:27:12 UTC] ojs2 has produced an error
Message: WARNING: Illegal string offset ‘en_us’
In file: /home/user/public_html/lib/pkp/classes/core/DataObject.inc.php
At line: 133
Stacktrace:
Server info:
OS: Linux
PHP Version: 5.4.40
Apache Version: N/A
DB Driver: mysql
DB server version: 5.5.42-cll
[20-May-2015 13:27:12 UTC] ojs2 has produced an error
Message: WARNING: Illegal string offset ‘en_us’
In file: /home/user/public_html/lib/pkp/classes/core/DataObject.inc.php
At line: 133
Stacktrace:
Server info:
OS: Linux
PHP Version: 5.4.40
Apache Version: N/A
DB Driver: mysql
DB server version: 5.5.42-cll
[20-May-2015 13:27:12 UTC] ojs2 has produced an error
Message: WARNING: Illegal string offset ‘en_us’
In file: /home/user/public_html/lib/pkp/classes/core/DataObject.inc.php
At line: 133
Stacktrace:
Server info:
OS: Linux
PHP Version: 5.4.40
Apache Version: N/A
DB Driver: mysql
DB server version: 5.5.42-cll
[20-May-2015 13:27:12 UTC] ojs2 has produced an error
Message: WARNING: Illegal string offset ‘en_us’
In file: /home/user/public_html/lib/pkp/classes/core/DataObject.inc.php
At line: 133
Stacktrace:
Server info:
OS: Linux
PHP Version: 5.4.40
Apache Version: N/A
DB Driver: mysql
DB server version: 5.5.42-cll
About refreshing the page, it does not help, even when I do a Ctrl+F5 refresh. I have to log out completely and then log in again to be able to get back on the journal manager user home page.
I had said in the earlier post that the issue occurs on chrome and firefox, but not on IE. We noticed today that while the issue does not occur on PCs with IE 8 installed, it occurs on PCs with IE 11 installed.
An update: We found that on Firefox, on various versions, we are not able to logout at all. This is logging out of the main account for different users (editor, section editors, readers), not the journals manager’s “log out as user” which does not work anyway.
Only when we clear the cache for the browser and then click on the log out link that we are able to log out.
On Chrome, while the “log out as user” still doesn’t work (works only after clearing cache), the main log out link works fine.
IE 8 still works perfectly, while IE 11 behaves like Firefox.
Was there ever a solution to this? We have a user reporting the same issue, and this is the only place I’ve found anything on it. If either of you have any more information on this issue, I would greatly appreciate it.
We did not have the resources to follow up on this after. @asmecher had suggested that it might be something that would need to be debugged at the coding level (we had made significant modifications to the instance of OJS that we are using).
Meanwhile, we have been working around it by logging out completely and logging in again, or clearing the cache, using different browsers, etc.
Thank you for your reply. I’m not sure we’re going to have the resources right now either. I wanted to let you know that we suggested using an Incognito window for all “log in as” activities to our user. I haven’t tested it yet, but it might be worth a try.
Sorry to hear this is still affecting you. I haven’t been able to duplicate that behavior here; that’s a fairly widely used feature and it hasn’t changed in its implementation for years, so I suspect it’s an unusual interaction with something specific to your server setup. I’d suggest inquiring if you have a caching proxy or something like that in front of your web server.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
Hi @ijma-usa . We had a similar problem. In that case, we change php (cgi) for php (fast-cgi) and this resolve it. I think that is a problem with php`s configuration (php.ini)