Configuration not working; new users cannot be created after using strawberry install v1.0.8

Hi,

Comments inline as blockquotes:
-- GeorgeClark - 27 Nov 2011

I have chosen to use Foswiki as our internal departmental wiki. Access will be over the LAN only, and not open to the internet.

I’ve configured Wiki’s before, mainly OpenWikiNG, however this this is my first time deploying Foswiki or Twiki and also configuring Apache.

Fearing the manual installation & configuration process on Windows, I installed with the strawberry installation package: http://sourceforge.net/projects/foswiki/files/foswiki/1.0.8/Foswiki-1.0.8-1-strawberry.exe/download

Subsequent to this, I can successfully access the server, and also login as Admin, however when I wish to create new user accounts it throws an exception:

On registering new name: Error registering user JoeBlogs? There has been a problem adding your user id to the Password system

Checking the apache log logs\error.log I then see:

Could not open password file: D:/Program Files/Foswiki/Foswiki/configure.htpasswd

I suspect this might be an old Foswiki bug on windows, where the trailing slash was not added to the path, resulting in filenames being concatenated to the directory. This is fixed in more recent releases of Foswiki.

Looking at the documentation http://foswiki.org/System/InstallationGuide#ConfiguringFoswikiManually, it seemed that I need to create this manually, so I have done, and copied to the FosWiki folder above (note file was first created in apache\bin\htpasswd.exe and copied across because FosWiki didn’t have htpasswd.exe in its path). The username chosen for the config user was unique per the instruction in the above installation guide “Issue the command htpasswd -c .htpasswd <username>, where <username> is the name of the user you will use to access the configure script. Choose the username with care: the username cannot be an existing login name for your Foswiki installation, nor can it be used later on to register in Foswiki. Enter a password when prompted”

However even though this was done I have tried running with the configure.htpasswd in different locations, and I still get the same error.

You should never have to manually create the .htpasswd file. As I noted above, it's probably a path problem

It seems to me that the strawberry installer didn’t fully complete the installation. How can I resolve this problem so that i) new user accounts can be created and ii) the server configuration can be executed at http://myserver:8000/foswiki/bin/configure?

Other background:

I don’t know if this is material, but this is the 2^nd Apache instance on the server. The other server is running via VisualSVN on a different port. Different Apache install folders however.

That shouldn't make any difference.

Included files:

C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\httpd.conf
C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\extra\fosWiki.conf
D:\Program Files\Foswiki\Foswiki\lib\LocalSite.cfg
C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\logs\error.log

On a slightly related note, how can I verify that the SMTP service is working?

Foswiki 1.1.4 adds a feature to verify the email configuration from configure. Prior to 1.1.4, you have to try registering a user. Or possibly use the mailercontrib to test sending email.

Many thanks!

Sorry for the very long delay in answering this. Installation questions are probably better asked on the #foswiki IRC channel. That way you can get realtime live help, and resolve issues much more quickly. -- GeorgeClark - 27 Nov 2011