[Freedombox-discuss] Tracking down the radicale problem.

[A. F. Cano]

In order to figure out why radicale stopped working on the FreedomBox, I
upgraded another computer to Debian testing so it matches the FreedomBox.

I had installed Radicale at some point, but certain directories were not
in place, so had to

mkdir /var/lib/radicale
mkdir /var/lib/radicale/collections
mkdir /var/lib/radicale/collections/afc

chown radicale.radicale /var/lib/radicale
chown radicale.radicale /var/lib/radicale/collections
chown radicale.radicale /var/lib/radicale/collections/afc

and copied addressbook.vcf and calendar.ics (from the FreedomBox) to
/var/lib/radicale/collections/afc

The /etc/radicale/config file is identical to the one at the FreedomBox.

in /etc/radicale/config [logging] section, uncommented the

config = /var/log/radicale/logging but nothing gets logged there even after a
restart (/etc/init.d/radicale restart).

And no wonder, I also have to change /etc/radicale/logging per

https://wiki.debian.org/Radicale

lots of changes.  See above web site.

All these changes (for logging) seem useless.  Nothing gets logged there.
it seems that the logging is done by uwsgi, whatever that is.  This is
getting much bigger than just radicale.

Per the /usr/share/doc/radicale/README.Debian, to enable radicale with the
"production" suthenticaton, had to do these steps:

install uwsgi-plugin-psgi, libapache2-mod-authnz-external

(uwsgi, apache2 were already installed)

ln -st /etc/uwsgi/apps-enabled/ ../apps-available/radicale.ini
/usr/sbin/service uwsgi restart

/usr/sbin/a2enmod proxy_uwsgi
cp /usr/share/doc/radicale/examples/apache2-vhost.conf /etc/apache2/sites-available/events.example.org.conf
/usr/sbin/a2ensite events.example.org.conf
systemctl reload apache2

Had to modify the "events.example.org.conf" file above:

The line

Include conf-available/radicale.conf

had to be replaced with

Include conf-available/radicale-uwsgi.conf

as the conf-available refers to the ../conf-available directory and since
I configured (see above) for using uwsgi that is the conf file that's
there.

The radicale-uwsgi.conf file is identical to the one on FreedomBox.

The web server starts and ps reports the same processes as in the FreedomBox,
but I'm still getting errors.

Then I realized that the radicae log file is actually at

/var/log/uwsgi/app/radicale.log

but the only warning I found there was:

Fri Mar 22 16:58:25 2019 - !!!!!!!!!!!!!! WARNING !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Fri Mar 22 16:58:25 2019 - no request plugin is loaded, you will not be able to manage requests.
Fri Mar 22 16:58:25 2019 - you may need to install the package for your language of choice, or simply load it with --plugin.
Fri Mar 22 16:58:25 2019 - !!!!!!!!!!! END OF WARNING !!!!!!!!!!

Went looking and found this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20176959/uwsgi-no-request-plugin-is-loaded-you-will-not-be-able-to-manage-requests

so installed uwsgi-plugins-all.  This pulled 47 dependencies and
8 suggestions.

And now I'm out of ideas.  I set up a DAV groupware resource calendar from
Korganizer on the same computer with login credentials as myself (regular user,
existing user account), configure the resource manually, added the resource,
with remote URL https://<computer name>/radicale/afc/calendar.ics (the same
as used to work in the FreedomBox before it stopped working) but when I "fetch"
it comes back with an "There was a problem with the request. HTTP error (0).

The same happens if I use localhost instead of the computer name.

Keep in mind that this is with the very latest up-to-date Debian testing
system.  Of course connecting to this new radicale server with the phone also
doesn't work, but given that DAVdroid is not the latest version (upgrading
this would require upgrading the whole android OS on the phone, a much larger
and risky task that I'm willing to do at the moment) there is the small
possibility that in this latter case it's the fault of the old DAVdroid, but
I suspect it's more likely to be a mis-configuration in the radicale server
and/or uwsgi/the web server.

There are no error messages in any log file that I could find.  Not in syslog,
daemon.log, messages, any file under apache2, radicale.log.

Does anyone have any idea what I'm missing? Somewhere I read that the data
needed to be migrated in the upgrade from radicale 1.x to 2.x but it didn't
say how.

Any hints? I would really really like to have radicale working again.

Thanks for reading this far.  Eagerly awaiting any solutions or specific
tests that I might run to narrow down the problem.

Augustine