A couple of days of Perl hacking have resulted in Newslog Version 1.2.0. This version should finally be 100% mod_perl-ready and I’m now running it under mod_perl here so I’ll be first to discover any remaining mod_perl bugs. I’ll post an update to freshmeat if I get a chance later today.
What a week! The MPAA is going nuts, our T1 problems resurfaced again (only briefly fortunately!), and lots of perl coding. And now we’re in the middle of a sudden pile of cold weather. It’s been below freezing two days in a row and there was even a bit of snow falling yesterday – all very unusual. I did manage to get some time to refurbish our sick linux box at home. The hard drive has been threatening to die for a while. I pulled the SCSI drive and controller card out and put in a spare 11gig IDE drive. I’ve installed RH6.1 and things seem good as new. It’s nice to have a real computer at home again. Now I have something to do while Susan works on her genealogy on the Windows box. And I’ll take a P133 with Linux over a PII450 with Windows any day…
Updating the newslog script has been on my todo list for quite some time. If this post works, I’ll be able to check it off the list. Newslog version 1.1.0 has a few new features and a few more bug fixes. I may even announce it on Freshmeat if no problems turn up tonight.
All the work with PostgreSQL lately has led to the need to install mod_perl and the DBI Perl modules. In addition to the basic DBI module and a PostgreSQL DBD module, I’m also trying out the ApacheDBI module. Apache DBI provides persistant connections to the database, eliminating the time delays associated with opening and closing connections for each query. Right now all this stuff is running on one of our test machines but we’ll be upgrading our primary webservers soon with new, faster hardware, RH6.1, and full database capabilities.
Yesterday, I did more experimenting with PostgreSQL. First I upgraded to the most recent release to fix a problem with pgaccess, the tcl-based GUI provided with the package. The eventual goal is to set up an interface between Apache and PostreSQL via mod_perl. Unfortunately, it appears that the mod_perl binary is defective in the Red Hat 6.0 for Sparc release. I installed it and then configured Apache to use it in the usual way – which consists of adding two lines to httpd.conf to load the modules and then uncommenting the mod_perl stuff in srm.conf. Apache segfaulted on startup. I grabbed the updated RPMs from the Red Hat ftp server that look like they’ll be used in the 6.1 release but the results were the same. Since we don’t plan on running Apache and mod_perl on the Sparc in the production system, I decided to stop short of attempting a comlete rebuild from the source RPMs. But if anybody has any insight into what’s causing Apache to dump core on startup, I’d be curious.
I’ve spent the last several days writing boatloads of Perl code on two projects at once. A demo of one of the two projects is going to be shown tomorrow so I should really be coding instead of updating my home page.
Our T1 is still a few days from being operational and the whole office is being routed through a single 56k dialup – I can’t believe people actually survive using these things all the time! The slow access is driving me insane and it’s only been a little over a week.