[Zope] Upgrade to 2.7.2 results in all content unavailable - SOLUTION!

[Wes Modes]

Thanks everyone for the help.  It was a combination of useful 
suggestions, blind optimism, tenacious persistence, and fervent desire 
to keep my job that eventually solved the problem.

It was neither super simple, not really complex.  The list of things I 
tried spans 6 pages in my notebook, so I won't bore you with that.  But 
I will give you a quickie summary.

The Problem:  A previous sysadmin had built both zope and python from 
source.  As is often the case, things end up in non-standard locations 
(or the standard locations change over time).  So with the monthly 
system software updates, the installer (Red Hat EL 4's up2date program, 
based on yum) gave me new versions of zope and python.  I apparently 
went from Zope 2.7.2 to Zope 2.10.5 and from Python 2.3.X to Python 
2.5.2.  I had no intention of updating either package, but neither was 
in the up2date exceptions file.

After the update, zope was still running but wasn't serving any 
content.  Even the ZMI and the Congratulations page were unavailable.  I 
could see that the data storage had not been lost, but nor had it been 
touched since the update.  I tried all sorts of things to get everything 
working again, but it looked like my best bet would be to install the 
latest versions of Zoep and Python and then import the old data.  So 
that's the path I took.

The Solution:  I rebuilt both zope and python to the most current stable 
versions.  In attempting to make the new packages work together, I noted 
that the old versions of python were installed in /usr/lib and the new 
versions were installed in /usr/local/lib.  So even when I went back to 
a 2.4.X version of python it couldn't find all of the modules that had 
been earlier built for it.  Once I moved some of the needed modules 
over, and rebuilt others, zope at least started working normally. 

Then after I moved the old data into place and restarted zope, all of 
the content returned.

Summary:  Be careful when updating python, it may leave all of its 
modules behind.

Wes

-- 

Wes Modes
Server Administrator & Programmer Analyst
McHenry Library
Computing & Network Services
Information and Technology Services
459-5208
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/attachments/20080414/bbfa1f95/attachment.htm