500 Error at App Login

[Chris Tucker]

Hey there, I'm getting a 500 error when I attempt to log in on both apps (iOS and Android) 2.8.10.
I'm on Centos7 on Bluehost VPS with PHP 8.0
Here's the error log:

[24-Aug-2022 11:54:42 UTC] PHP Warning: Undefined variable $languageid in phar:///home/alagntmy/public_html/forum/core/vb/vb.phar/session/api.php on line 229
[24-Aug-2022 11:54:42 UTC] PHP Warning: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /home/alagntmy/public_html/forum/includes/vb5/template.php(404) : eval()'d code on line 4
[24-Aug-2022 11:54:42 UTC] PHP Warning: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /home/alagntmy/public_html/forum/includes/vb5/template.php(404) : eval()'d code on line 22
[24-Aug-2022 11:54:42 UTC] PHP Warning: Undefined array key "channelid" in /home/alagntmy/public_html/forum/core/packages/yilmazxviewing/api/xviewing.php on line 35
[24-Aug-2022 11:54:42 UTC] PHP Warning: Undefined array key "nodeid" in /home/alagntmy/public_html/forum/core/packages/yilmazxviewing/api/xviewing.php on line 36

[Trevor Hannant]

Those are warnings rather than errors so shouldn't actually affect logging in. Is that all that shows when you try logging in?

[Wayne Luke]

Please make sure that you're using vBulletin 5.6.6 or higher. It is recommended that you use vBulletin 5.6.9 for full compatibility with PHP 8 and 8.1 changes.

[Chris Tucker]

Trevor Hannant Those are the only log entries that populate per login attempt. On the iOS UI, I get these:

Is it possible this is a file permissions issue? Right before, image uploads weren't working, so I was reading documentation on file permissions and tweaked some of those. Now I get this, but only on the app UIs.

[Chris Tucker]

Please make sure that you're using vBulletin 5.6.6 or higher. It is recommended that you use vBulletin 5.6.9 for full compatibility with PHP 8 and 8.1 changes.

Im running 5.6.9

[Wayne Luke]

Does the issue occur if you disable the Yilmaz X Viewing package in the AdminCP under Hooks & Products → Manage Products?

[Chris Tucker]

Wayne Luke, yessir.

[Chris Tucker]

I’m going to try to roll back to a backup from a day or two ago before I started working on these issues. I’ll post the results once I have it.

[Wayne Luke]

This is the only core issue in your list:

[24-Aug-2022 11:54:42 UTC] PHP Warning: Undefined variable $languageid in phar:///home/alagntmy/public_html/forum/core/vb/vb.phar/session/api.php on line 229

The others are from the add-on package. I am not sure why this would trigger a 500 error. Unfortunately a 500 error is pretty generic and simply means something went wrong somewhere. Generally, with vBulletin, this means a fatal error in PHP and that would be logged as such. Are there any fatal errors in the PHP error log?

[Chris Tucker]

I've got this:

134.16.73.200 - - [24/Aug/2022:10:36:36 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 236 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/104.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
134.16.73.200 - - [24/Aug/2022:10:39:35 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 301 236 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.5 Safari/605.1.15"​

[Chris Tucker]

So I went back to the WHM PHP profile that I saved prior to making the aforementioned tweaks. That didn't change anything, but I knew it to work at the time.

Next step, I uninstalled the apps on both iOS and Android and reinstalled them. It must have taken caches out with the uninstalls because the fresh installs resolved this issue. Thanks both for your help!

[Chris Tucker]

Well, never mind. Still having the issue. It’s almost like a session isn’t being kept, but sort of is. I’ll fiddle around and post back with findings.

[Chris Tucker]

Im still having the issue on both apps. It seems that the apps don’t do a good job of “cleaning up after themseves” so to speak. If there’s a crash, which occurs often, the next load doesn’t go looking for latent sessions and leftover data to clean it up. It just tries to pick up from where it left off, which is obviously not a place of health. I posted a bug with the mobile guys’ bug reporter linked on another of Trevor’s posts. I’ll see if anything comes of that.

I will say, it seems odd though that the vBulletin app that actually serves vBulletin is relatively stable, while in the case of client users’ deployments there’s a relatively consistent flow of problems. who maintains vBulletin’s app deployment, and are they abailable to help on this forum?

[Chris Tucker]

I've noticed in the vb_session table that when the app does crash, it does leave behind the session row, unaltered. Unlike when a legitimate logout occurs, where it zeroes out the user ID. I'm not able to test this, but I suspect that there's hanging session data left on the phone after a crash which isn't cleaned up. This appears to be interfering with the subsequent login attempts. The only way to fix it is to uninstall the app and reinstall it.