Thread

I have (had) a fully working site, upgraded to the latest build of 1.6.9. The upgrade wizard completed as expected, but when I try to access the site or control panel, I get an error message saying

Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; Invalid Preference Data

. Can anyone offer any help as to where to start looking for causes?

Best regards,
Pål Degerstrøm

Greetings Pål,

Shifting this over to the EE1 forums for you. Which version did you upgrade from? Were any manual modifications to the database made?

The site was running the latest build of 1.6.9, and I was upgrading to 2.1.0 (latest build). The upgrade wizard completed without errors, but when it was finished I couldn’t access the control panel or view my site. The only thing visible was “Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; Invalid Preference Data”.

Brandon,

I just sent you a message with a link to a video that illustrates the problem. I hope you’re able to help me out.

Note: I’ve disabled all extensions and modules in the 1.6.9 install, and disabled storing templates as files.

Best regards,
Pål Degerstrøm

Pål,

Brandon is off shift at the moment. Could you send me on the video please. Moving you back to the EE 2.x forums

EDIT: I now have the video thanks

Pål,

Can you do a repair on your database before attempting an upgrade again please

Admin > Utilities > SQL Manager

To recap: My 1.6.9 install is working as expected. Via the 1.6.9 control panel, I’ve deleted all templates and created a single template group with one template, disabled saving templates as files, deleted a few weblogs (channels) that I didn’t need, set access to sessions and not cookies, and done both repair and optimize on the database tables. To me, the 1.6.9 install works exactly as it should.

The 2.1.0 upgrade wizard completes without any complaints, but as soon as I try to access the control panel or the site itself, I get the dreaded “Site Error: Unable to Load Site Preferences; Invalid Preference Data”.

I’m sending Brandon and John Henry a dump of my 1.6.9 and 2.1.0 databases, and hope they’re able to help.

(I’m in Norway, so my replies are a bit late due to the time difference).

Pål

Hi Pål,

Brandon and John Henry are both off shift during the weekend. You can also send me your dump but have you made any special edits to your config file? You should have some data in your exp_sites table, is that the case?

Cheers

Greg

Greg,

I just sent you a message with links to the database files and my config.php (no edits have been made, this is the one that’s working for my 1.6.9 install).

I do have some data in my exp_sites table, but it seems to me that the data in “site_system_preferences” is truncated.

Pål

Hi Pål,

Thanks for sending the files over. I can see the truncation in the preferences field. I’m going to check with the rest of the team about the best way to proceed. Thanks for you patience whilst we figure this out.

Cheers

Greg

Greg,

I added a few lines to print some debugging info to some of the EE upgrade files. Specifically, I print out the contents of whatever is being base64 encoded. I added code to controllers/wizard.php, updates/ud_200.php, updates/ud_201.php and updates/ud_202.php.

I’m sending you a link with the updated files and the resulting log file. I hope this helps in resolving this.

Best regards,
Pål Degerstrøm

Guys,

You can set this thread to “solved”. After digging around, I found out that my 1.6.9 database had this at the start of “site_system_preferences” in the “exp_sites” table:

a:98:{s:15:"encryption_type";s:4:"sha1";s:10:"site_index";s:9:"index.php";s:9:"site_name";s:16:"Pål Degerstrøm";

That is my name in there, and I couldn’t change the text from either the control panel or the config file. So I manually entered the content to:

a:98:{s:15:"encryption_type";s:4:"sha1";s:10:"site_index";s:9:"index.php";s:9:"site_name";s:12:"helpfulhoops";

(While holding my breath, obviously…)

So my conclusion is that there must be one bug in EE 1.6.9: Changing site name in the control panel or config file doesn’t affect the contents of the “site_system_preferences” database entry.

Also, I suspect there must be one bug in the EE 2.1.0 upgrade wizard as well: Non-US letters cause errors (perhaps this is native to PHP’s serialize function?)— in my case, “å” and “ø”.

In any case, the upgrade seems to be working now. Thanks to the EE guys for helping out.

I should note: To access the control panel I had to set

$config['admin_session_type'] = 'c';

and

$config['cookie_domain'] = 'mydomain.com';

in config.php

Thank you for the information, Pål. We’re still looking into this. Just to confirm, you are now up and running?

To any others that might encounter this issue, please do not edit the database manually unless instructed to do so.

Thank you for the information, Pål. We’re still looking into this. Just to confirm, you are now up and running?

Yes, everything is working as expected.

To any others that might encounter this issue, please do not edit the database manually unless instructed to do so.

He he, will I be punished?