john.parnefjord.se Reflections & findings

Installation

Installing PHP5 on IIS5.1/IIS6 proved harder than I initially thought, much due to some minor issues that gave some very odd failures. Anyway this is how I installed PHP5 and solved the different obstacles that I ran into.

Download the msi-package from http://www.php.net/downloads.php. Some argue that you should go for the zip package, as they claim that the msi-package doesn't work. Well, it does work.

For those of you that have ever used Linux/Unix professionaly know that you can't do without grep. In Microsofts world most of the tasks are oriented against using GUI:s and thats perhaps why I can feel a bit frustrated from time to time with Windows. Sometimes the tiniest, simplest task, that could easily be solved on Linux, just takes forever or has to be dealt with some special tool. Which quite often means installing a heap of tools to check out before one can deal with the actual problem.

Previously I used the command

dpkg-reconfigure locales

to set locale on Debian/Ubuntu. Now that I got a new Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy server I was trying to change locale using the familiar command.

Since the advent of the debianized version of Dell OMSA installation has been a breeze. Just add the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list

# OMSA
deb http://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

and then install using

Update! After the first installation according this post I could connect to the director agent but it was only a regarded as a level 0 agent from the director server. When trying the core services there was of course lots of libraries missing. I don't doubt that I could get director running but what at price? What I really wanted was a simple way to monitor the server, especially the raid, for example using SNMP. Director isn't lightweight in any respect, it eats cpu cycles and mem, so i decided to skip and pursue another path. It wasn't worth the effort.

When I tried to update tripwire on a Debian Etch installation the other day it failed with the error:

  Interactive Update failed.      
### Error: Report file could not be parsed.  Report may be corrupt.        
### Exiting... 

I used the ordinary syntax to do the update, ie:

  tripwire --update --twrfile /var/lib/tripwire/report/server-YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS.twr

On another server it worked perfectly, the only difference is that they use different locales, so I tried running with another locale on the failing server:

SANSurfer FC HBA is a tool by Qlogic to manage SAN connections from a server. If you happen to run a Debian box it may be the case that you run it headless. In that case you may run the CLI version of SANSurfer. Unfortunately, quite a lot of vendors just distribute their programs as RPMs not DEBs, and SANSurfer is no exception.

As I can't distribute the program as a Debian package I can at leats show you how I made a package myself to make it easier to install on several machines. In my case these machines are IBM X3950 with Qlogic 2460 HBA cards.

The other day I had to move a project from one Subversion repository to another repository on another server. The project that I had to move, I call it projectx, was a solitary project in a repository and was to be moved in to a repository housing multiple projects.

Anyway, the move was easier than I thought. I started with dumping the project on the server that I was aiming to move from.

As a good user you should not run with administrator privileges. Perhaps you already know this and if you practice what you preach you might use the Runas... functionality that is available in Windows. Just right click on the file you want to execute and choose Runas... Then you get the opportunity to enter what user the file should be run as.

This information is perhaps outdated with the advent of Debian Etch but I see that quite a lot of people have tried to find this information on the site. The info was lost during a move to another CMS, but here it is again.