I decided it was time for me to write another blog post though this one is not going to be as long as the others I've written (hopefully). This was a problem that I had been working on for at least a month on an off which required a ticket to be opened with castopod, searching the internet forever and finally getting ChatGPT to look at it all, make suggestions, and finally I realized what I was going on.

Installing Castopod

This tutorial is designed around hosting #castopod on an Ubuntu server while using #docker as my method of running it. I utilized the automatic server installation of Docker that comes as an option when installing a server but I also had to run sudo apt-get docker-compose -y to also get the other portion needed on the server.

Once you got that on, go ahead and follow the instructions on the main website.

https://docs.castopod.org/getting-started/docker.html

Once that is done, two possible things will happen. Once you go to localhost/cp-install, you'll either see the super user creation screen or you are going to be greeted by a warning that the program was not able to connect to your SQL database. In the logs you'll see

**castopod-db | 2023-07-14  0:04:00 4 [Warning] Access denied for user 'castopod'@'172.27.0.3' (using password: YES)**
castopod-app |
castopod-app | [CodeIgniter\Database\Exceptions\DatabaseException]
castopod-app |
castopod-app | Unable to connect to the database.
**castopod-app | Main connection [MySQLi]: Access denied for user '****'@'172.27.0.3' (using password: YES)**
castopod-app |
castopod-app | at SYSTEMPATH/Database/BaseConnection.php:418

This is the point that I really got stuck and spent almost a month scouring the internet, creating a ticket, closing said ticket after two weeks then creating a new one specifically about the same issue appearing in the docker installation.

The castopod developers did not get back to me (which is fine. I understand it's supported by volunteers and they have a lot of time. This is not me knocking them) but I decided to go to my last resort of asking ChatGPT based on the information I had. It made suggestions that actually fixed the issue.

If you get this issue where the database can't connect due to access denied, you'll need to run the following commands:

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/docker-compose
sudo chmod 666 /var/run/docker.sock

Once that is done, you need to clear out the previously created volumes and start up again.

docker-compose down --volumes --remove-orphans

docker-compose up -d

Once you've done that. You should be good to go!

Ending

I know that generative #AI is still a hot button topic in the #infosec world but I am one that thinks that it can be used for good to help and I wanted to show case how it helped me which allowed me to find an answer for everyone and save the developers a lot of trying to figure it out.

Of course, I'm not going to opine on AI here in this small article but I wanted to be upfront on how it helped and how it can help the #selfhosting community when it comes to issues like this in Castopod.

Until next time!

— Jonathan S.