Posts from ‘March, 2010’

[Update: As is often the case when lots and lots of people (say, the whole Internet)
look at a problem, I came to this conclusion independently along with a
whole bunch of other folks.  I wrote this freshman effort at
blogging prior to becoming aware of the "Eternal September" concept;
however, this trope of pre/post-1993 Internet quality is much [...]

For Mac OS X users who installed the Software Update with a security component on 24 March 2003, some things might be broken if you use Apache, Sendmail, or the Perl PostgreSQL module DBD::Pg.
—
1) Regarding Sendmail:
See http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030306145838840
(relevant error message: Sendmail might complain in /var/log/mail.log of “Deferred: Connection refused by localhost “)
(summary: Apple makes sendmail look [...]

OK, I have determined what blogs are for. They give an easy way to publish aggregated technical fix information in a search-engine-friendly format. Aggregated: quite often, fixing a specific technical problem (even a common one!) requires looking around the web at a number of false leads on mailing list archives, tech docs, knowledge bases, etc. [...]

After having fixed the DBD::Pg bug resulting from the faulty Apple Security Update, which necessitated recompiling Postgres and running sudo ranlib /usr/local/pgsql/lib/libpq.a I discovered another bug.
My PostgreSQL was compiled with UTF-8 support, and my DBD::Pg was rebuilt/reinstalled after the Postgres recompile. However, my scripts were still bombing out with:

dyld: perl Undefined symbols:
_is_utf8_string
Trace/BPT trap

This posting [...]

If you try to compile Apache (1.3.28) with mod_ssl, following the plain vanilla directions in the relevant sources, under Red Hat 9 (and using RH9's installation of openssl), you are likely to get an ugly error like this:
gcc -c -I../../os/unix -I../../include -DLINUX=22 -I/usr/include/gdbm -DMOD_SSL=208115 -DUSE_HSREGEX -DEAPI -fpic -DSHARED_CORE `../../apaci` -DSHARED_MODULE -DSSL_COMPAT -DSSL_USE_SDBM -DSSL_ENGINE -DMOD_SSL_VERSION=”2.8.15″ mod_ssl.c && [...]

Apache 2.0 can be a real cast-iron bitch.  It's got this cool
support for threading that you think will make your life easier but it
turns out to have all sorts of little API differences that break your
legacy apps, in really horrifyingly difficult to discern ways. 
This might be the apps' fault or Apache's fault, but either way [...]

For users of the Perl modules XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT, you will save yourself much puzzlement if you understand that “Can't coerce GLOB to string in entersub” really means “file not found.”
NOTE that the file which is not found might be your XML, your XSLT, or the schema / DTD for these things! Maybe some [...]

If you go to install the Perl module DBD::Mysql on Red Hat 9 with MySQL 3.23 (and probably other versions as well), two gotchas might appear.  First, if the MySQL bin directory is not in your path, then you won't be able to have it pull the options automatically.  Make sure that when the Makefile.PL [...]

I use SSH for everything from tunnelling outbound mail in order to avoid port 25 blocks on the freenet providers (such as www.personaltelco.net) to simple terminal sessions.  Also, most all of the time I am hooked up via a DSL or Cable modem with a router in front of it playing NAT tricks to get [...]

Possible scenario: you wrote an ancient script using the CGI.pm module by Lincoln Stein, and it ran fine on your old RedHat 6.2 box with Perl 5.00503 and an ancient version of CGI.pm.   However, after reinstalling your script on a newer box with Perl 5.6, or else after upgrading your perl and/or CGI.pm, your script [...]