[Koha] Upgrade Problems

[Joel Ewy]

Greetings,

I administer a Koha server for a small church library (and am going to set
it up for another), and I'm only called in to work on it a few times a year,
when there are problems.  It was first set up in 2007 and has been upgraded
a couple times since then.  Each time has been a struggle to get it back
online.  I'd like a little better understanding of how all the pieces work
together so I can get it working again.

Until last week the server was running under Ubuntu 10.04.  After replacing
a faulty video card, I decided to run the operating system updates that had
not been installed since my last visit.  Somehow this broke Koha, so I took
the opportunity to upgrade to 12.04, having seen on the other machine that
I'm working on that the Koha Debian packages aren't happy with 14.04 yet.

The OS upgrade went well, but Koha was still having problems.  Specifically,
no search results were being returned, and when I tried to update the
database and rebuild the Zebra index I was getting errors that wouldn't let
me proceed.

I followed the instructions at:
http://wiki.koha-community.org/wiki/Moving_an_installation_from_a_regular_install_to_the_Debian_packages
and imported a backup of the database into a new instance.  I can now run
the programs to update the database schema and rebuild the Zebra index, but
only using sudo, which I take it mangles the permissions for Zebra.

Also, now I can't log into the administrative intranet.  I copied the
username and password from my old koha-conf.xml to the new one, and that had
been working until I created a new instance.  The username and password I
had used before don't work now.

So here are my questions:

1.  It's unclear to me what user account I'm supposed to be using to rebuild
the Zebra index.  I have an Ubuntu user called 'koha' that was inherited
from 10.04, and when I created a new instance, another user 'bcmckoha14' was
created.  Am I supposed to be running the Zebra index rebuild as one of
those users?  I can 'su' to these accounts, but when I try to rebuild the
index, it prompts me for a sudo password and then complains that those user
accounts are not sudoers (which of course they shouldn't be.)  So just how
exactly is this supposed to be accomplished?

2.  Where are Koha admin authentication failures logged?  I assume that
every time I fail to log in to localhost:8080 that should be logged
somewhere.  Knowing where might set me on the trail of why this is now failing.

3.  I have tried reinstalling Zebra, and it grabs a password I had created
for the kohaadmin account from somewhere and inserts it into its own
otherwise fresh config files.  What are the Zebra username and password
supposed to authenticate against?  A user account on the system?  A MySQL
user?  Where and when is this created, and how can I fix it now that it's
goofed up?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Joel Ewy