VirtuAlexPress

My boss asked me to install Bugzilla on our local server. The task happened to be relatively easy, however Bugzilla needs functioning mail server to be anyhow useful. I tried my SMTP server, but it did not work very well, probably because of our firewall which I have no control of. Sendmail is not functioning too, maybe for the same reason, and I have no clue how to troubleshot that animal. Anyway, mail servers are currently beyond my means, but I find it useful to document basic Bugzilla setup for historical purposes.

First of all I needed functioning web server. Apache already was there, so the only thing I had to do was starting the service:

# /sbin/service httpd start

It was immediately accessible at http://localhost.

Next step was to install MySQL server, since Bugzilla needs one. That went smoothly. The guide I googled up (do not remember which one exactly) instructed first off to secure MySQL with following commands:

$ mysql -u root mysql
mysql> UPDATE user SET password = password(’FryWucThyft4′) WHERE user = ‘root’;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

where “FryWucThyft4″ is some random password for database root account. To test it, disable anonymous user, and set up bugzilla user with password “WocEfcic5″:

$ mysql -u root -p mysql
mysql> DELETE FROM user WHERE user = ‘’;
mysql> GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE, LOCK TABLES, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, DROP, REFERENCES ON bugs.* TO bugs@localhost IDENTIFIED BY ‘WocEfcic5′;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

After that I’ve edited /etc/my.cnf to add this random stuff:

[mysqld]
# Prevent network access to MySQL.
skip-networking
# Allow packets up to 1M
max_allowed_packet=1M
# Allow small words in full-text indexes
ft_min_word_len=2

At that point I’ve installed Bugzilla per se. When it was there I’ve changed configuration file to accommodate for new fancy password in /etc/bugzilla/localconfig. The variable of interest was $db_pass. When it was done, I was ready to create the database:

# /usr/share/bugzilla/checksetup.pl

It asked to set up administrator email, real name, and password. When the database was created I followed advise to allow the table to grow to 20GB (it is said to be 4GB by default):

$ mysql -u bugs -p
mysql> use bugs
mysql> ALTER TABLE attachments AVG_ROW_LENGTH=1000000, MAX_ROWS=20000;

Finally I had to make bugzilla accessible from our web server, so I made a link in web server’s root:

# ln -s /usr/share/bugzilla/ /var/www/html/bugzilla

and adjusted directory settings in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf to be:

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +Indexes +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
DirectoryIndex index.cgi
AllowOverride Limit

After I’ve restarted the web server to read new configuration:

# /sbin/service httpd restart

new shiny Bugzilla was at http://localhost/bugzilla/.

After first login it asks to change parameters: maintainer, urlbase, cookiepath, utf8, requirelogin, createemailregexp, and mail delivery method. The last one is the problem…