Cheshire PHP problem - was Re: [WBEL-users] What your choice of Linux distribution says about you

[Jason Balicki]

bishop <mailto:bishop@platypus.bc.ca> wrote:
> That sounds like an odd problem for sure.  Have you a procedure or
> method of duplicating the state this box was in before you reinstalled
> all that?  I'm wondering if a %post was setting something based on the
> existence of something else - a no no - that wandered away afterward.

I wasn't really asking for help on this one, I just wanted an
excuse to use the "WBELs wobble" line, but if it helps the cause,
I'm game. :)

I don't have a method re replicating the state, other than
starting over.  The install date for this server is this
coming weekend, so I don't want to do that just for the sake
of curiosity.  If I had another machine with the same hardware
config I'd do it and report results.  But I don't, unfortunately.
 
> Dare I hope that everything was installed from RPMs?

This was a fresh install of WBEL and setting up PHP-Nuke
was the first thing I tried.  However, PHP-Nuke was not
installed via RPM.  PHP-Nuke doesn't add any libraries or
anything like that, though.  You just drop the files somewhere
in your docroot, set up your database and go.  If you want
I can give you my install.log and install.log.syslog.  I'm
also willing to share a tarball of that docroot directory and
a dump of the database (with the passwords changed or zeroed,
of course.)  Everything except PHP-Nuke was RPM.  The database
dump is VERY small (784k uncompressed).  This app is used as a
start page for my orginazation, with links to internal and
external services, plus announcements on a very rare basis.
It doesn't change much so it's very small.
 
> I'm thinking that I may be able to replicate this setup, with your
> help becuase I have never used PHPNuke, and find out the cause of
> this.  The goal, of course, would be to remove what seems to be a
> problem based on the order in which things were installed.
 
> The order in which things install shouldn't ever be a factor, and your
> situation leaves me perplexed for sure.

This is a brand new box, a 2U chasis with an intel S875WP1-E
server board in it, with 1GB RAM and a 2.8Ghz hyper-threading
enabled 800Mhz FSB P4 chip, using a 160GB SATA HD & only using
the 1Gb NIC (there are two NICs, one 10/100Mb that's enabled
in the bios but the drivers aren't loaded and a 1Gb that's
running.)  There is no other hardware in the system, the
video is integrated on the board.  This box is to be our main
Samba-based PDC, file and print server.

In a nutshell, here's what I did:

1)   Installed WBEL on a new box.
2)   Ran "yum update"
2.5) made sure that php, mysql and php-mysql was installed
3)   did a mysql dump of the old server*
4)   copied /var/www/html/fm (docroot of php-nuke) on old server to new
5)   restored database on new server
6)   attempted to connect, got failure ("blank page").
7)   messed around a lot**
8)   yum remove php-mysql mysql-server mysql httpd php
9)   yum install php-mysql httpd mysql-server
10)  connected***

* old server was a RH 7.3 box.  PHP-Nuke is version 6.5

** history available on request (will take a while, I'd
want to edit and annotate it), but mostly consisted of
trying to find where the failure was occuring.  It occured
at the line:

$db = new sql_db($dbhost, $dbuname, $dbpass, $dbname, false);

in db/db.php, leading me to believe that php-mysql wasn't
working right (even though it was installed.)  There were
no error messages anywhere, just a silent failure.  I
kept adding 'echo "I'm here<br>"' lines until I found
where they stopped.

*** this is a condensed account & this process started
on a Friday and ended early afternoon the following
Monday.  I tested this migration on other machines
that I have and all of them worked.  Except, of course,
for the one that the app had to live on.  I tried installing
fresh copies of PHP-Nuke and CPG-Nuke (a GPL fork) and
both hit the same failure.

> NB:  In the days when all my servers were similar, I used virtual RPMs
> to devise profiles that were then installed by a single Apt
>   invocation. The same can perhaps be done with Yum, and can make
> your task of bringing new servers online that much easier.  You may
> want to look into it all.

That would be great, except:  1)  No two of my servers are the same and
2) even if I could replicate the base install, no two of my servers
come on line close to the same time (this case is a fluke and is not
likely to happen again) so if I bothered to create profiles, they'd
need to be updated by the time I'm ready to scratch-install a new
box -- I would be doubling work for myself.  I'm not a hosting
company with thousands of boxes, I'm a small mortgage company with
less than 10 servers (but growing, slowly.)

Thanks for your interest,

--J(K)