Tom's Insights - Week of 2/18/02

Week of February 18th, 2002

Most Recent : Sunday, February 24, 2002
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Sunday February 24, 2002

What's worse than 1 sick child? Two sick children. Both Danielle and Landon appear to have a bit of the flu. All part of being a parent, I guess -- things never happen in isolation. Trust me. Never.

Despite the extra hours of TLC today required, I managed to get a lot done on the computing front. A lot of of very intense stuff, actually. I still haven't rec'd any useful feedback on my Apache 2.0 problem, although I do have several people working on it. Given the silence, I decided to take matters into my own hands (grin)... I wiped all visible traces of Apache 2.0 from Hydras, then started the process over again, from scratch. Download the source. Build the binaries. Install and test. Nope. No joy. So I embarked on a new adventure

I went to the latest CVS tree and downloaded the source from there. Then there's adventure of building Apache from CVS. First you have to build a 'configure' file, which takes automake, and auto-something-else, and aclocal, and the M4 binaries... the end result was about 4 hours of downloading, try-to-build-the-source, read more README files, and download more stuff. In the end, I actually got apache-2.0.32 to build without error (very ugly and not recommended for the feint-of-heart). So I fired up /user/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start, and got the same error I have for the last four or five days: cannot load module blah-blah. Arrggghhhh. Oh well. Learned lots, and I now know how to build Apache on AIX from the CVS tree.

In the meantime, between downloads and builds, I stuck my head deep into Niederst's latest Web Design in a Nutshell (2nd ED), and started playing around with XHTML and CSSs. I managed to convert almost all formatting tags out of my weekly template and into a CSS file, AND make it all render close to the original. Delightful. My post tomorrow is based on the fruits of my labors. I actually had a lot of fun converting my weekly template, and learned tons about XHTML, HTML, and CSS in the process. A worthy use of an afternoon, IMHO.

My final conquest of the weekend was to DL the current Samba CVS tree to Hydras, ./configure, make, make install. So far it's running like a top, and noticeably more responsive than the 2.2.x series. I'm pleased. I have a remarkable sense of confidence in the current alpha Samba CVS tree. Well done gents!

It's been a long day (moving large stones takes both brawn and brain; just ask the Egyptians), but in the end, worth the effort . Cheers. Hope your weekend was peaceful and memorable.

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Saturday February 23, 2002

Sheesh. What a messed up 48 hours I've had -- technologically speaking.

I didn't post Thursday night as I was busy getting Apache 2.0.32 to compile. Thanks to Jeff Trawick for the guidance; I would have never in a thousand years figured it out alone. Here's the scoop:

untar the binary cd httpd-2.0.32 CC=gcc build/binbuild.sh



This will build a binary distribution of Apache called,

httpd-2.0.32-powerpc-ibm-aix5.1.0.0.tar.gz in the parent directory

(in my case, /usr/local/src)

there's also a README file in the same place.
Uncompress the above file and follow the instructions in /usr/local/src/httpd-2.0.32/README.bininst file to install.

Success. Well, sorta. The above steps built and installed Apache without error. But when I went to start it, I got the following:

[tom@hydras]:/export/home/tom # su -c '/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start' root's Password: Syntax error on line 216 of /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf: Cannot load /usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_access.so into server: /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start: httpd could not be started [tom@hydras]:/export/home/tom #

Bother. I don't have a clue. I've tried everything I could think of to no avail. What's most troubling is I had the identical error a year or so ago with Apache 1.3.something, and I eventually fixed the problem. Turned out it was nothing to do with 'loading modules'. But I can't for the life of me remember what I did. Double bother.

Last night we had a bitch of a snow storm. Lost power a couple times, and we just got Internet connectivity back a while ago. Sigh.

And last but not least, the XP installation on my notebook appears to have -- for no explainable reason -- imploded on itself. But only with my profile. I can login as Administrator and all is well and good. But when I login as me, nothing works. The desktop appears, but clicking on any of the icons produces an hourglass and nothing. Eventually the hourglass goes away, but the program in question does not initialize. Everything is coated in a sea of molasses. If I can manage to wake things up enough to logoff, by logging on and off a few times I eventually get a functional desktop/OS. Plain weird. I'm stumped on this one too. I'll likely rebuild my profile from scratch, but first I need to save all my do-do's and configurations somewhere. Triple bother.

I think I need a break from technology for a day or two.

BTW, my Samba PDC tutorial was very well rec'd by IBM; I just might be able to wangle a loaner/eval xSeries machine out of them that will enable me to do some further tutorials on similar topics. Fingers crossed.

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Wednesday February 20, 2002

Yes, indeedy, we certainly do live in a topsy-turvey world.

The Yates trial. Innocent by reason of insanity? Apparently, a classic post-partem despression case. I'm glad I don't have to sit on that jury.

The Middle East. Home of my friend Moshe. Home of more violence in the last week, than any one's seen in the last 18 months. Escalation? Almost a given. To what end? No one knows.

And the Gates/Microsoft debacle. Scot Hacker, of byte.com has written a compelling article (well, at least to me) entitled He Who Controls the Bootloader. Recommended. An engaging read.

And in my wee, small world... I spent a long day at the keyboard. Got Apache 2.0.32 installed (without incident or error, BTW) on Phoenix. And downloaded the latest Samba 3.0 CVS. Compiled, make'd, etc. Running like a top. And had a small foray into "Radio Userland" (Radio Userland 8). Nice. Clean and simplistic. Doesn't work for me, but it is an impressive effort.

Onward... forever onward.

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Tuesday February 19, 2002

The third beta of Apache 2.0 was announced last week (2.0.32) and a call went out to all willing to test the product on as many different platforms and scenarios as possible -- meaning that the project's contributors are feeling pretty confident in v.32. Which also means we could see a final release soon. Unfortunately, I've been trying for three days to build 2.0.32 on Hydras to no avail. Very frustrating. I sure wish I knew more about programming and reading source code. The make process is complaining about an "unexpected '|' " in a certain file, and I can't for the life of me see any '|'s anywhere. I joined the Apache users mailing list today and sent out an S.O.S, so hopefully I'll get a response from someone more learned than me.

Other than my Apache failures, it's been pretty quiet around here the last couple days. Just sorta going with the flow...

I'm going to start a new project tomorrow, and take Samba 3.0 to the next level of functionality and complexity: Samba as a PDC with user info and authentication residing in an LDAP backend. Wish me luck!!

And yes, I will eventually be moving my insights to a PHP/MySQL/Apache system as soon as I find one that's stable. I wasn't too impressed with the 5.4 release of PHP-Nuke; rough on the edges and some security concerns as well. I'm looking at a couple of alternatives, but my research time has been a little sparse of late.

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