Issues Galore With Vault 4.0

jayson.knight · Post by **jayson.knight** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:22 pm

I upgraded my 3.5.x installation to 4.0 yesterday and have been having nothing but problems. Most of them I have been able to work around, but first and foremost the new web admin tool is seriously lacking in usability. It took me 20 minutes just to realize that you need to A) type in values and then B) navigate away from that field BEFORE the save/submit buttons are enabled...I thought the entire site was broken. Issuing a postback when leaving a field is an overkill, and not intuitive for users.

I also get 404's when attempting to navigate to server/vaultservice/vaultweb/default.aspx (redirects to server/vaultservice/login.aspx, and it should redirect to server/vaultservice/vaultweb/login.aspx.

None of my website settings were preserved during the upgrade (impersonation settings), and the path to the Vault.config file is hardcoded as c:\wwwroot\inetpub? Why not use a server.mappath() to get the correct path? That was another 20 minutes or so before I found the setting in web.config. Also, even though the user I am impersonating has full rights on the web folder, any setting that requires write access to the config files gets an access denied error, and only adding full rights for network service fixes it.

On the repository access page, when I attempt to add rights for a group, nothing happens. The page posts back but nothing is saved. I also cannot figure out how to add new groups to the repository (I have 3 groups, but only one is displayed in the groups dropdown list).

The lastest issue is that now I cannot check in new files, getting access denied. Considering I haven't changed any of the security settings I'm a little surprised, and even more surprised that I cannot intuitively figure out how to fix it.

Lastly, I could not run the Vault Client tool without first renaming the .manifest file since I'm on XP x64.

The only thing keeping me with Vault right now is that previous versions have been of very good quality. The Admin interface needs some serious usability testing (or just go back to the WinForms version of the tool...it was fast, easy to use, and everything 'just worked' in it).

THanks
Jayson

neal007 · Post by **neal007** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:46 pm

I agree on the admin UI. I think there needs to be some serious modernization and usability enhancements. It's an archaic web page system, something today should be taking advantage of modern controls such as ComponentArt's suite, AJAX, etc. It is cumbersome, thank God my stuff was configured prior to the upgrade or I would have never cared to go through the configuration.

I too reported the issue regarding the save being disabled, I told Jeremy it should never be disabled unless you are preventing a double-click. Even so there is javascript to prevent that.

Put on your seat belts, we're along for a ride over the next six months while this thing smooths out.

Next time folks, try PUBLIC BETA!

Post by **jeremy_sg** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 5:35 pm

Jayson,

Thanks for the comments, I'll try to address them individually.

1. The admin UI. The save enablement issue is occasionally very annoying. We redid the admin tool in order to add the feature for "repository admins", which would not be possible with the old admin tool.

2. The 404 errors are concerning to me. Were you using a bookmark which pointed to a page that went away? If that's the case, it would redirect to the login page, which would then redirect to the page that went away. A copy of the URL that you see at the login page would give me an idea of where the successful login would bounce you.

3. Impersonation is always tricky on an upgrade. The installer will always configure what you select in the impersonation page of the installer, despite what is already configured. To retain your impersonation, you need to select "Custom" on the impersonation page. See http://sourcegear.com/vault/support/install3.html

The inability to add repository access rights concerns me. Can you give me a bit more details? There are two things that can happen

* On the Repository Access page, are you seeing all of the groups you expect in the drop down list?
* If you select one of the groups and hit the "Assign" button, is the group getting an assignment?

Sorry about the manifest file. That will be fixed for 4.0.1, and if you want I can send you a pre-release build.

blickley · Post by **blickley** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 7:35 pm

I'm getting 404 errors all over the place too. In fact, I can't login to the admin tool at all. When I bring up the main page at:

http://localhost/vaultservice/index.html

and then click "Log In" (first link), it takes me to a page not found error as follows:

http://milhouse.hr.upenn.edu/VaultServi ... e%20server.

If I go to the login page mentioned above, then I start getting default.aspx page not found errors.

I hopo some can help quickly, this is awful. The pages it is looking for do not exist.

-Chris

neal007 · Post by **neal007** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 7:40 pm

I had to uninstall, delete the AppPool, then reinstall for mine to work. You can go to http://yourvaultdomain/admin to login. Try it manually in your browser.

neal007 · Post by **neal007** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 7:42 pm

One issue I had, which is probably a non-issue to do the Virtual Directories having the proper setting:

-My Main web site in IIS had ASP.NET 1.1 assigned
-Virtual Directories had ASP.NET 2.0 assigned

As far as I know, ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0 cannot share the same AppPool

blickley · Post by **blickley** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 7:58 pm

I uninstalled and confirmed that all the virtual directories were removed. I then re-installed and now it appears ok. Looks like the upgrade process isn't working to well, but now I'm up and running. Thanks!

-Chris

neal007 · Post by **neal007** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:26 pm

Yep, I duplicated this on two servers, both of which I had to uninstall, clean, reinstall and then it would work.

jayson.knight · Post by **jayson.knight** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:10 pm

jeremy_sg wrote:Jayson,

Thanks for the comments, I'll try to address them individually.

1. The admin UI. The save enablement issue is occasionally very annoying. We redid the admin tool in order to add the feature for "repository admins", which would not be possible with the old admin tool.

2. The 404 errors are concerning to me. Were you using a bookmark which pointed to a page that went away? If that's the case, it would redirect to the login page, which would then redirect to the page that went away. A copy of the URL that you see at the login page would give me an idea of where the successful login would bounce you.

3. Impersonation is always tricky on an upgrade. The installer will always configure what you select in the impersonation page of the installer, despite what is already configured. To retain your impersonation, you need to select "Custom" on the impersonation page. See http://sourcegear.com/vault/support/install3.html

The inability to add repository access rights concerns me. Can you give me a bit more details? There are two things that can happen

* On the Repository Access page, are you seeing all of the groups you expect in the drop down list?
* If you select one of the groups and hit the "Assign" button, is the group getting an assignment?

Sorry about the manifest file. That will be fixed for 4.0.1, and if you want I can send you a pre-release build.

Hi Jeremy
Thanks for the response. Responses follow:

1. Once you realize that's how it behaves, it's ok...it just doesn't really behave like a web application.

2. No bookmarks, and I will set up and PM you an admin account login to my test vault site I'm working with on my home server. For anyone else keeping score, navigate to http://vault.jaysonknight.com/vaultserv ... login.aspx (use your server name of course), enter in the login and see what happens. On my server it attempts to navigate to http://vault.jaysonknight.com/VaultService/default.aspx (one level up from vaultweb) and generates a 404. Something is wrong with the formsAuth redirect generated by asp.net. If you go to http://vault.jaysonknight.com/VaultServ ... fault.aspx (manually navigate to the default.aspx page in vaultweb) it generates another 404 by trying to redirect to http://vault.jaysonknight.com/vaultservice/login.aspx (in both cases, the vaultweb directory is getting stripped out). This is an upgrade, and I haven't changed any of the IIS settings for this test site.

3. I've had mixed results with this on subsequent testing, but would think this should be preserved during an upgrade as impersonation is tricky period.

4. No, I'm only seeing one group (I will PM you a login as I stated above). No, the group does not get assigned. The page does a post back to the server, but the dropdown goes back to not assigned.

I will try what some others have said (blow the entire installation away and start over), but thought I would give you a chance to poke around first. Again this is a test site...my production site is 3.5.2, but definitely want to get this sorted out before moving to 4.0.

Thanks again for the response.

jayson.knight · Post by **jayson.knight** » Wed Jun 06, 2007 10:14 pm

blickley wrote:I'm getting 404 errors all over the place too. In fact, I can't login to the admin tool at all. When I bring up the main page at:

http://localhost/vaultservice/index.html

and then click "Log In" (first link), it takes me to a page not found error as follows:

http://milhouse.hr.upenn.edu/VaultServi ... e%20server.

If I go to the login page mentioned above, then I start getting default.aspx page not found errors.

I hopo some can help quickly, this is awful. The pages it is looking for do not exist.

-Chris

The workaround for me is to manually type in vaultweb after the vaultservice part of the URI, i.e. http://milhouse.hr.upenn.edu/VaultService/vaultweb/login.aspx.......rest of the URI. Not glamorous, but it works until SG comes back with a solution.

Post by **jeremy_sg** » Thu Jun 07, 2007 1:57 pm

We've reproduced the problems that were causing 404 errors after an upgrade. The web.config was not getting modified correctly. Vault 4.0.1 will fix this issue, and for now the only workaround is to uninstall 4.0 (choosing to keep the database) and then reinstall 4.0 (choosing to keep the database).

adamt · Post by **adamt** » Tue Jun 12, 2007 2:33 pm

I'm also having an issue adding groups to the repository access identical to jayson's description.

Our vault install is an upgrade from 3.5.2 to 4.0.0 as well as a database move from sql server 2000 to sql server 2005 on a different server. I had no issues with the move or installation after following the instructions in a knowledge base article refered to in the support forums on moving the vault database.

I did a little digging and I think I've identified the cause of the problem adding groups. The primary key constraint on the repository access table doesn't take into consideration the join type (U/G which I assume means User or Group), so attempting to add a group with the same id # as a user id # that already has access to the repository will cause a primary key violation error that causes the group not to be added.

I hope this information helps the developers of vault fix this and the other issues with their new version, as I have come to be quite happy with the product and it's development team over the past couple years using vault.

Adam T
LDP Inc.

andrews · Post by **andrews** » Wed Feb 06, 2008 9:25 pm

jeremy_sg wrote:We've reproduced the problems that were causing 404 errors after an upgrade. The web.config was not getting modified correctly. Vault 4.0.1 will fix this issue, and for now the only workaround is to uninstall 4.0 (choosing to keep the database) and then reinstall 4.0 (choosing to keep the database).

We were initially testing on an old Win2k machine with SQL Server Express, which installed and worked with no problems.

I'm now trying to install Vault on a new Server 2003 64k box with SQL Server 2005. Vault's home page loaded ok, but the login page was giving us an XML Parsing Error. I read another post on the forum that linked to a Microsoft page, telling me to run aspnet_regiis.exe. Having done so, the XML Parsing Error's gone ... and now I'm getting 404s instead on all but the home page.

Blowing away the Vault 4.0.6 install and reinstalling has not fixed the issue. I've tried switching from/to 64 and 32 bit ASP.NET, with no luck.

andrews · Post by **andrews** » Mon Feb 11, 2008 7:59 pm

We've found the solution - by default IIS wasn't configured to enable ASP.NET. The process for turning it on is documented here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315122

Post by **jclausius** » Tue Feb 12, 2008 8:21 am

Glad you figured it out.

I'd also recommend double checking your configuration for Win 2003 Server - Installing Vault Server on Windows 2003 Server.