I was awake until gone 4 this morning, trying to crack an apparent permissions problem on a MySQL database.<\/p>\n
The database runs a content management system (indexing\/categorising\/tracking metadata\/grouping and, of course, reporting.<\/p>\n
It was brought to my attention at about 7pm last night that the content management system wasn’t letting registered users (or administrators) add new content\/update metadata.<\/p>\n
This is something of a problem, for a content management system.<\/p>\n
Obv.<\/p>\n
I logged on to the database as senior user and experienced the problem first hand.<\/p>\n
My first thought was that the permissions had somehow become unstuck, and the user hierarchy had assumed a permission value of ‘null’.<\/p>\n
I checked the user permissions in the admin panel and they were all as they should have been.<\/p>\n
I flipped in to the database and looked at things from there, and saw nowt wrong there either.<\/p>\n
Hmm. Puzzling.<\/p>\n
I then spent several hours running through logical, systematic checks (eg: creating a new user, assigning standard permissions to a section, validating those permissions with the database, writing to the database from the backend with those permissions – etc, etc, etc – up and down the structural, content and permissions-based hierarchies.<\/p>\n
I spent several hours achieving some things and not others.<\/p>\n
By 4.15am I was too tired to think straight, but switching off the light didn’t help; I couldn’t sleep for ages.<\/p>\n
I woke at 9am and had an idea.<\/p>\n
What if the .php front-end was somehow fudging the permissions? Concealing functionality? Somehow?<\/p>\n
Unlikely, but I was running out of places to look.<\/p>\n
I checked the read\/write permissions on all of the trigger .php files.<\/p>\n
Nope, nothing off-key to be found.<\/p>\n
And then I had another thought.<\/p>\n
What if it was the design template?<\/p>\n
Supposing that there was a not-permissions problem, a something else kind of a problem with the design?<\/p>\n
Something missing? Something garbled\/corrupted? Something somewhere, that was occluding (word?) a fundamental line (or block) of executable code?<\/p>\n
I am not a design expert.<\/p>\n
I don’t do flashy front ends and high quality UX audits. I understand function point analysis, yes. I understand integration\/interfaces, yes. To a (limited) degree I understand databases of various flavours.<\/p>\n
But I’m not a front end developer.<\/p>\n
And the person who did the front end development on this application has long since vanished back to Sydney.<\/p>\n
I surrounded myself with the few debugging tools I have, gave myself two hours to unpick the front end code, looking for a bug, or a garble, or a thing that didn’t make any sense.<\/p>\n
At just under an hour I thought I was on the track of it.<\/p>\n
At an hour and ten minutes I knew I had the problem in my sights.<\/p>\n
I changed some syntax in a section of triggers, got out of bed, showered, brushed my teeth, got dressed and took the bike out for a ride.<\/p>\n
When I got back, a couple of hours later, I had lungfuls a plenty of fresh air, and a clear head.<\/p>\n
I went straight back to the area I had been working, completed the tidying up, applied the new code and blow me down, it only went and worked.<\/p>\n
Registered users now have read\/write access to the appropriate areas of the system (as designated by their admin settings).<\/p>\n
And I tidied up a very minor presentational thing that has been annoying me ever since I started looking after the product.<\/p>\n
What caused it?<\/p>\n
What was the terrible event that triggered this near-apocalyptic devastation?<\/p>\n
In a nutshell, I upgraded the database.<\/p>\n
It was a legacy product which I had just dragged up to MySQL 5.x (MySQL 5.6.15) from an unstable MySQL 4.1 – and what’s that, something like nine years old?<\/p>\n
The front end developer had hard-coded certain (but unnecessary) database calls in to the front end .php.<\/p>\n
Upgrading the database (a thing I did on Boxing Day), disconnected the hard-coding and the system had a paddy.<\/p>\n
It was that simple.<\/p>\n
Yes, very easy to believe that the problem was permission-based. But actually it was a disconnect in the front end that was producing symptoms of a\u00a0permission-based failure.<\/p>\n
I got there.<\/p>\n
A more highly-skilled front end wiz would probably have got there much quicker than I did.<\/p>\n
But I’m not a front end specialist.<\/p>\n
I’m just a geek who does stuff here and there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was awake until gone 4 this morning, trying to crack an apparent permissions problem on a MySQL database. The database runs a content management system (indexing\/categorising\/tracking metadata\/grouping and, of course, reporting. It was brought to my attention at about 7pm last night that the content management system wasn’t letting \u2026 Continue reading