Moodle in English

Hi all

This is a cross post from the general discussion forum. Apologies if this is not the correct place to post, but I had no replies on the general discussion forum.

Current setup:

Nginx webserver 0.5.19 (http://www.nginx.net)
PHP 5.2.1 (cgi-fcgi)
PostgreSQL 8.2.3
Moodle 1.8.2 Stable (upgrade from 1.6.3 via 1.7.2)

Nginx proxies client requests to PHP running via the FastCGI that is listening
on a local port on the server. The problem I am having is that after our move
from a previous server (that was running Apache 1.3.x) I have had to disable
slasharguments, and fix paths in the database so that links to files on the
data store are accessed correctly (basically, changing "file.php" to
"file.php?file="). So, all data is now accessible. However, the problem lies in
existing data structures that contain relative paths e.g. an html document
referencing a swf file in the same uploaded directory. These are broken and I understand this to be a result of disabling "slasharguments".

I have replicated the same environment on my laptop, making sure that
slasharguments are enabled, as this is the area that needs fixing. I have been
looking at the code in the "file.php", but not understanding PHP very well, I
am struggling to see what is actually happening. When I click on a file that
has been uploaded successfully in a dummy course, I get the error, "404 Not
Found", served up by Nginx. The actual request path is:

http://moodle/moodle5/file.php/2/nginx.jpg

I wrote a PHP script to display what fastcgi parameters are
effectively being passed from Nginx via fastcgi to the PHP interpreter and
accessed the corresponding URL.

The current FastCGI parameters, defined in the Nginx virtual host config, are
as follows:

{
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:1026;
fastcgi_index index.php;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME
/Users/username/Sites/Documents/moodle$fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type;
fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length;
fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_NAME $fastcgi_script_name;
fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name;
fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol;
fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr;
}

Currently the output of the php script is as follows:

Server Name: moodle
Server Address: 127.0.0.1
Protocol: HTTP/1.1
Request Method: GET
------------------
Script Name: /Users/username/Sites/Documents/moodle/moodle5/clientip2.php
Query:
Path Translated: /moodle5/clientip2.php
Path Info: /moodle5/clientip2.php
Request URI: /moodle5/clientip2.php

What I am trying to ascertain here is where the problem is arising: is it with FCGI or with Nginx. Then I can begin to have a better chance at solving the issue.

Could anyone explain to me how "file.php" works, as I am very fuzzy with PHP? I recall reading a whole bunch of posts on these forums stating that IIS was originally having issues with slasharguments, and that in Apache 2, the directive AcceptPathInfo must be enabled either in the httpd.conf or in a .htaccess. This directive does not exist in Nginx, but I do see that the "PATH_INFO" is echoed in the above script, so I am a little confused. I have also toggled "cgi.fix_pathinfo" on and off, and when it is given the value of "1", "PATH_TRANSLATED" and "PATH_INFO" are no longer echoed out.

Thanks for reading, and any help would greatly be appreciated.

Mike