Critical error after upgrades

Hi Friends,
Partly because of a warning I saw in Piwik, saying my PHP version 5.3 was EOL (end of life), my host upgraded the PHP version (for all his clients) (and upgraded a lot of other stuff too). Somehow, that broke my Piwik (but not anyone else’s Piwik, in his server farm).

It had stopped tracking, and instead of my usual dashboard, I saw some kind of error page, which allowed me to send a report to piwik. (maybe “crash” report, I don’t remember) At the time, I didn’t know my host was doing upgrades, so I sent the report, thinking it had died out of the blue. When I notified my host about the error page, that’s when he told me he was doing upgrades, including the PHP version. And it looks like he also upgraded Piwik, to 2.9.1.

Also, there were 2 errors showing on my System Check page – 1 critical, and 1 optional. For the optional one, it was File Integrity. Somehow, that got fixed, which caused my dashboard to come back, and Piwik started tracking again. (Although I’m not sure if it’s tracking properly.) The critical error is still showing, and my host hasn’t had time to work on it. So I thought there’s an outside chance I might be able to fix it myself, with your help.

So on System Check page, the critical error, under Other Required Extensioins, mbstring has the red X. And in bold red text, it says:

“The mbstring extension is required to handle multibyte characters in the User interface and API responses. Also please check that mbstring.func_overload is set to “0” in php.ini.”

And it’s repeated twice, for some reason.

The only other issue, is that my Geo Location option isn’t working. iir, I had set up PHP Geo Location. So I’m thinking I’ll reset that, after this error is fixed. Although I don’t know, maybe they’re related, and fixing one, will fix the other?

Does that sound like something I could fix? Or should I just wait until my host has time to fix?

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

Well, it seems like my host hasn’t had time to fix this, and the geolocation is one of the things I enjoy most in Piwik. Since I posted the first message, I’ve concluded that the critical error refers to the broken GeoIP. Because the error message for the critical error is:

The mbstring extension is required to handle multibyte characters in the User interface and API responses. Also please check that mbstring.func_overload is set to “0” in php.ini.

and the troubleshooting info for the broken GeoIP

Error: Cannot find the mb_internal_encoding function. Please make sure the mbstring extension is installed and loaded

both refer to the mbstring extension.

I’ve searched the piwik website, but can’t find any mention of mbstring or mb_string. It sounds like reinstalling that extension would be the solution. But where to download from, and where to install (which dir), is what I haven’t been able to find.

If I can’t fix this, I might just reinstall Piwik. But the problem with that, is while I have installed things onto my server in the past (actually managed to install Piwik myself), I’ve never uninstalled something from the server, and not sure if there’s anything more to it than deleting the files.

Can anyone tell me either 1) where to get the mbstring extension, and where to install it (which dir), or 2) if uninstalling Piwik from a cPanel server is anything more than just deleting all the files and databases?

Thanks for your help :slight_smile:

Hi there, can you please post the error message here? the message or problem will help guiding you to a solution

It sounds like reinstalling that extension would be the solution.

Yes it sounds like all your problem could be solved by installing mbstring. Maybe during the PHP version upgrade your host didn’t install this extension?

  1. where to get the mbstring extension, and where to install it (which dir)

mbstring is a PHP extension, which means to install it you must have “root” access to the server (i.e. admin access). I doubt this is the case if this is your host that upgraded the PHP version. So you need to ask your host to do this.

If you have root access, then it depends on the OS of the server. For example with CentOS you need to run the following command: yum install php-mbstring. Have a look on Google for your OS.

  1. if uninstalling Piwik from a cPanel server is anything more than just deleting all the files and databases?

That’s enough to uninstall Piwik. You could also simply delete the files and reinstall by reusing the same database (to avoid loosing your data). But anyway, this wouldn’t solve the problem of the missing mbstring extension, so I doubt it would solve everything.

matt, I did post the error messages. Maybe putting them in quotes wasn’t such a good idea?

Thanks for your comments Matthieu Napoli.

Oohh, so the mbstring extension isn’t part of Piwik? No wonder why I couldn’t find it on the Piwik website! I wonder why he would have had that extension installed before, but not reinstall it with the upgrade? So then reinstalling Piwik won’t solve the problem.

I guess I’ll have to resort to bugging him about it. I don’t think I have that access. Or maybe I can figure out how to install the PECL version?

Well, thanks for giving me that info anyway. :slight_smile:

Sure!

To install an extension with PECL you need root access too so you’ll need your host help.

Well maybe there’s good news. I found PHP PEAR Packages, which looks like allows me to install PHP extensions. So I’ll investigate further. Cross fingers B)