Open Microscopy Environment

Dear all,

we recently saw a very strange behaviour of the webclient on our OMERO 4.4.9 installation. First thing we noticed was that it sometimes took up to 20 force-reload attempts in the browser (no matter which one, or which OS) until the webclient was actually displayed. Other than that it seemed to work fine, only after a few weeks I realized that the data of one of our test users was presented in a state as it was several months ago. Using Insight I was able to see the current data of this user.

That finally pointed me into the right direction and I found the reason for the above issues: during the last upgrade (4.4.5 to 4.4.9) somehow the temp directory configured in nginx for the OMERO webclient got lost. After recreating it and restarting nginx, all the issues were gone.

I've been particularly surprised by the fact that the webclient did show user data, but presented a state that it had months ago. So apparently there is some caching happening somewhere outside the (at that point non-existing) temp directory. Would it be possible to check for existence of the temp directory from within OMERO's code to prevent such out-of-sync situations for other users in the future?

Cheers
Niko

Hi Niko,

By default OMERO.web shouldn't cache any data, although your webbrowser or as you pointed nginx might do it for you. Could you send us your nginx config and output of bin/omero config get?

Ola

Hi Ola,

the files are attached to this posting. I have to say it's a bit annoying that not even ".txt" files are allowed for attachments here (and no hint is given which extensions are accepted)

Please note that I stripped sensitive stuff, the LDAP and email sections from the OMERO config output, and I replaced the hostname in all files by "our.omero.fqdn".

Many thanks,
Niko

Hi Niko

I can't see anything obvious in your nginx config. Do you still have the OMERO.server logs for your old and upgraded installations? If so would you be willing to zip them up and upload them to our QA system https://www.openmicroscopy.org/qa2/qa/upload/ so we can take a look at them? If you also have your system nginx logs (/var/log/nginx) available that could be useful too.

Many thanks

Simon

Hi Simon,

which files would you need there? The "Blitz-0" logfiles are too big, they only go back until mid January due to logrotation. The "Processor-0" logs still exist from last September.

Cheers,
Niko

Hi Niko

Ideally we'd like all your logs, especially the Blitz and OMEROweb ones. They're plain text so should zip up into a reasonably small archive.

Simon

Hi Simon,

I've uploaded them in the 7z format: https://www.openmicroscopy.org/qa2/qa/f ... 979b66420d

BTW, how can I reset my OMERO.qa password?

Cheers
Niko

Hi Niko,

I will send you private message how to change password.

Ola

Hi Niko,

I had a look at the supplied log files and configuration values and, as Ola mentioned, nothing stands out as a cause for the behaviour you were experiencing. The only other place that I can think of responsible for caching would be the Django cache (set by omero.web.cache_backend) - but your settings file doesn't have that set, so by default it is switched off.

If you encounter this behaviour again, please let us know and we will again try to grok the log files for any anomalies.

Regards,
Blazej

Thanks Blazej, I will keep an eye on this. As I said, it only happened while the configured temp-directory of nginx was missing. But back then even restarting ngingx and/or the OMERO services didn't change anything.

Thanks again,
~Niko