Blank management page and no fog database created on Red Hat

[SquidgyHobo]

Server

• FOG Version: 1.4.4
• OS: Redhat

Description

I am trying to install FOG 1.4.4 on a clean installation of redhat but when I get to the part where I am supposed to go to serverIP/fog/management and click install/upgrade the page is just blank. If I tell the installation to finish, it completes without error but I am still unable to get the management page to display. During my own troubleshooting, I have found that after the installation, no fog database has been created in mysql as well.

At one point I suspected that the httpd service might be the problem so I did a clean installation of the OS and just installed httpd. With that installed, I am able to go to the server IP address in a browser and get the apache landing page, however after I run the FOG installation, going to that same IP address gives me a completely blank page, just like the management page.

I suspected that maybe the lack of a fog database might be the cause of the blank page so I have tried manually creating a blank fog database but that did not get the pages to behave any differently. At the end of the FOG installation, it makes a backup .sql file that is supposed to be a backup of the database. I tried using the commands to restore a fog database to import that backup file but that did not help get the page to load either. I have a working 0.32 FOG server already so I tried making a backup of its fog database and restoring it to the FOG 1.4.4 installation but that didn’t help either.

I have verified that the mysql password for root is blank and that the FOG installation settings reflect this as well.

I ran the command ‘tail -100 /var/log/httpd/error_log’ after a clean installation of both the OS and FOG 1.4.4 and these are the results:
[Thu Jun 29 21:23:57 2017] [notice] suEXEC mechanism enabled (wrapper: /usr/sbin/suexec)
[Thu Jun 29 21:23:57 2017] [notice] Digest: generating secret for digest authentication …
[Thu Jun 29 21:23:57 2017] [notice] Digest: done
PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/lib64/php/modules/gd.so’ - libX11.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0
[Thu Jun 29 21:23:58 2017] [notice] Apache/2.2.32 (Unix) DAV/2 PHP/5.3.17 mod_ssl/2.2.32 OpenSSL/1.0.1k-fips configured – resuming normal operations
[Thu Jun 29 21:24:13 2017] [error] [client x.x.x.x] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘&’ in /var/www/html/fog/commons/init.php on line 132
[Thu Jun 29 21:24:19 2017] [error] [client x.x.x.x] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘&’ in /var/www/html/fog/commons/init.php on line 132
[Thu Jun 29 21:24:24 2017] [error] [client x.x.x.x] PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘&’ in /var/www/html/fog/commons/init.php on line 132
[Thu Jun 29 21:25:21 2017] [error] [client x.x.x.x] PHP Fatal error: Cannot create references to elements of a temporary array expression in /var/www/html/fog/maintenance/create_update_node.php on line 25

One other odd thing that I have noticed is that at the very beginning of the FOG installation, I see these lines:
mkdir: cannot create directory /run/rpcbind': No such file or directory touch: cannot touch /run/rpcbind/rpcbind.lock’: No such file or directory

[george1421]

What version of rhel are you using?

PHP version 5.3 is a bit old too, but lets start with what version of rhel your using.

[SquidgyHobo]

That version of PHP was installed by the FOG installer automatically so I assumed that was the version it required.

I am using RHEL 5.3 (Tikanga).

[george1421]

@SquidgyHobo RHEL 5.3 isn’t supported by FOG.

RHEL 5.3 also it went EOL from Redhat Jan 2011. I would not even use that in my environment since it is susceptible to a handful of nasty and well publicized vulnerabilities.

RHEL / Centos 6.5+ and 7.x are currently supported, as well as the Debian variants.