So here's my problem. In my frenzy to be current, I upgraded to Snow Leopard. This shouldn't be a problem, right? Well, for a while when our server wasn't working, it was no problem to me. However, once the server was fixed, I could then connect to MySQL again. This made me fire up my favorite tool, YourSQL. Unfortunately, YourSQL is not fully compatible with 10.6, so this leads me to my problem. I need a new tool for editing MySQL. If anyone has any suggestions, I will review them all on my blog and pick the best one for a complete review and expose. So, let the comments come in, and I'll pick the best of the best!
Recently in Servers Category
Well, over the past few weeks, we have been having some interesting adventures with our XServe. First, the upgrade to leopard, the downgrade to tiger, the fix for Perl. Then the hack, and fix. However, in the middle of all this, our server (Mac OSX Server, Ver. 10.4.11) started to freeze.
What is happening is that when you open an application, then it takes forever for the application to open. There is no CPU activity, and it seems like the server is just waiting for something. I can't tell what it's doing, but it seems like it's just waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting...
As far as background processes go, everything works fine. The web works, FTP and all other services work, just the UI freezes. Apparent Fix: Restart Finder. It has been running fine all day since we restarted Finder.
All for now!
Quoted from http://www.jameslockman.com/jamesblog/2009/09/fix-for-perl-gd-imagemagick-an.html:
Fix for Perl, GD, ImageMagick and more on MacOSX Tiger Server - James Lockman's Blog
A week of frustration followed my attempt at upgrading my XServe G5 Dual Processor from Tiger Server to Leopard Server. Silly me, I made the bold assumption that Apple would have the decency to leave the underlying server parts untouched and add their secret sauce for blogs, ical, collaboration, and the like, on top of what was proven. What do I mean by proven, you ask?
How about perl, or PHP, or MySQL? I used to have a perfectly acceptable Movable Type blog (this one, in fact) running happy as a clam on this server. I had never been able to get ImageMagick to properly install, though, as well as some convenience modules like Compress, but hey, Leopard was going to make everything all better. However, when we (props to my son Arthur, whose patience and tenacity led to success) "upgraded," nothing worked anymore. The web is full of complaints about various pieces of this puzzle, so I will leave it up to you to go digging. As for my blog and other data-driven and dynamic graphics-based sites that used to reside on this server, they were defunct. Dead. Doornail dead.
GD is important, as is DBI, DBI::MySql, ImageMagick, PerlMagick, and others. Without them, the Blog just doesn't go. Of course, the major technologies like MySQL and PHP are essential, but the versions provided by Apple were either just plain broken, or were inadequate for the tasks at hand. Of course, we reinstalled!
MySQL and PHP installers are available and we installed them according to the clear instructions provided by MySQL.com and Marc Liyanage, respectively. The tricky part was getting the built-in PHP to shut off and the new one to turn on, but judicious application of the "refresh view" button on the server manager cured that.
Then we turned to MacPortsto install the additional modules. What a disaster.Not MacPorts, mind you, it performed admirably. None of the ports we installed appeared in the list of installed perl modules, despite getting successful reports from MacPorts. I admit that after a few days of banging my head against the wall, I had had enough.Giving up, we scrapped Leopard Server and went back to Tiger Server. But, we were still without some modules.
It turns out that Apple's installation location for the remaining items is not where the rest of the world expects them to be. In the case of perl, when we check our version with CPAN, it reports that we have the current version of perl, and that our modules are installed. We were successfully able to install modules, and they all appear to install without issue, except for PerlMagick, which reports a whole pile of errors. More on that later. When we run the mt-check.cgi from the Movable Type installation, however, we get paths to multiple perl installs, none of which are the current version. Clearly, there is some major confusion here.
The solution turns out to be easy: ditch Apple's mangled perl distribution and put in a link to the good, current installation in its place. The following two lines in the terminal move the old perl installation to a safe place where it can do no harm, and then create the appropriate symbolic link to the /opt/local/bin/perl folder, where we have all of our modules installed.
sudo mv /usr/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl.origsudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/perl /usr/bin/perl
Voila! All of my modules are now installed and available to MovableType. GD, DBI, DBI::MySQL, Compress, and all of the others we were lacking, except for PerlMagick.
Even though we used Ports successfully to install ImageMagick, PerlMagic fails, and it fails because of Apple's path problem. So, to install, download the tarball, then follow the instructions. Here's the key, though.
Remember the /opt/... directory? In the makefile.pl file, locate the LIBS and INC entries and change "usr/" to "opt/" in all of the path references in those two lines. Then, build as normal. Double voila!
Now, everything works as we expect it to. I can upload images and get thumbnails, I can connect to databases from my web sites and blog, and I believe that I can detect the aroma of rose coming from the exhaust fans of the XServe right about now.
Let me start by saying this to everyone who reads my blog.
If you use Movable Type, DO NOT UPGRADE TO LEOPARD SERVER!!!
The reason that I haven't blogged for the past month is due to the fact that Leopard server has more bugs than the first release of Windows Vista. It is missing almost all of the MySQL headers that allow Perl to talk to it. You have to go and download all of the MySQL header files from Apple website. That is a pain.
Once you have all of those installed, you'd think that the DBD::mysql modules required to hook perl up to MySQL would install correctly. Well, they wouldn't. Neither would DBI or any other of the data connection modules for Perl. So, after fighting with this for weeks (this is not an exaggeration. It actually took us weeks to get this to finally be useless) we decided to downgrade back to Tiger server.
After running a few basic commands, our server was back up running again in Tiger. Later on this week, I'll post a detailed instruction on how to get MovableType working on Tiger server with no hitches.
Again, if you know what's good for you, stay away from Leopard Server. Later on this year, we hope to have a working instance of Leopard server. We have another G5 tower, and will attempt to get leopard server working on that. Until we can figure out how to get it working, we'll be staying with Tiger.
All for now!
