Climbing the Mountain

I would love to see the "Not Advanced" edition of Everest... When a company puts out a product, you generally expect that it will function as expected without much tweaking. If you decide to take the plunge and purchase Everest Advanced Edition for your business, throw that idea out the window. I will say this: It does function as expected about 75% of the time. My issues are with the data importers.. Everest built an importer for just about anything you can think of. One would think, Great! This will be faily easy! FML...

After sitting here dealing with the new company wizard for the past day and a half, I am ready to throw something through a window. You are suppossed to be able to import all of your customers/vendors/chart of accounts/etc.. I wrestled with the COA importer for 6 hours, tweaking, casting data types, retweaking, cursing, re-casting, filtering, changing, more cursing, and finally ended up hand-entering all 256 accounts. This is not how it should be. Probably another "feature" of the program, just like the 5 character limit on the password.. No matter what order I used to enter the accounts, I would run into errors, "This account already exists" or "Parent account does not exist" or some other variation of the two...

Now on to the inventory items, it has taken over 30 minutes to import 437 items. The importer works (thank god..) but it is abnormally slow.. I ran a trace on the SQL database to see what's up, it appears to issue over 50 statements to import one item.. relational databases on crack.

Ubuntu = Not Boo.

Just as I suspected, reformatted the server, install Jaunty Server, and within 30 minutes had PHP5/Apache2/Mysql5/FreeTDS 0.8.2/and the MSSQL.so extension working.

Just affirming my idea that Solaris is overly difficult for absolutely no reason. It reminds me of the old school linux versus RedHat when that came out. All the fun of Linux with none of your files where you'd expect them.

Only issue that I ran into during the installation was the fact that Jaunty has no package for the MSSQL/php system. Easy to build by using this post..

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-986689.html

Just in case anyone needs to know.

Simply build as specified in the post, cp the libtds.a from the hidden directory to (Where you d/l FreeTDS)/lib

Give php's ./configure --with-mssql=/(location where you d/l FreeTDS)

example ./configure --with-mssql=/home/user/freetds-0.8.2

# make && make install

Easy as that!

Solaris..... shit

Since my workplace decided that all systems running Linux must move to Solaris containers, I decided to finally take the plunge and get all dirty with Sun's baby. Started with Solaris 10, installed without much of a hitch and seemed to operate fine. Java Desktop was a bit strange, but that comes with time I suppose, that is until I hit the "Get Updates" option and realized the $$ that comes with it.

Downloaded OpenSolaris, seemed to be similar enough to "real" Solaris. Installed even easier that Solaris, which should have been the first clue. All seemed to be going to plan. Fired up the Package Manager (being from Ubuntu, liked the apt-get-y-ness of it all), installed the gcc/gcc-dev, and amp packages. Wouldn't you know it, the blasted thing actually worked! I had in 45 minutes a working PHP/Apache 2.2/Mysql 5 box up and running. I felt like a Sun God! Then came the phpinfo(); Some of the configuration options were a bit off, needed tweaking, plus FreeTDS was still looming out there waiting to be installed (Yes, I know it's dirty, but IMHO asp/IIS is way too vulnerable to be used in prodcution.) I was able to download and install FreeTDS fairly simply, I downloaded php 5.2.9 from the web and fired up ./configure.............

1 Hour Later..........

After much tweaking and swearing, I finally had all the strange installation locations for MySQL/Apache figured out and set correctly. Also set the options needed for FreeTDS/OpenSSL to work correctly. ./configure, success! sudo make time, complete failure. For some reason autoconf was placing a "-mt" as one of the libtool configs during compilation, so of course that not being a vaild sun/gcc option it errored out each time. Searching PHP's site / Google, no resolution. I found many people with the same problem, but no solution. nano'ed the Makefile, and removed the ambiguous -mt. Success! Perfectly compiled, after a quick make install and restart of apache (which btw, apachectl is not in the $PATH, thanks sun!) php 5.2.9 is up and running with MSSQL support, but no longer has MySQL support!

I take a look at the make output and see that it couldn't actually find MySQL during configuration.... but it exited 0... Ok, reconfigure php with the actuall path to MySQL 5. Re-Make/install/restart... same output.. no MySQL...

Back to the drawing board.

I kill the amp package, download Apache and MySQL source and decide to go it the "old fashioned" way. Configure apache with the support and locations required. Well, Hello "-mt" my old friend! Looking closer at these packages from OpenSolaris.org I notice a common theme. They appear to be built from a strange location, and installed to a virtual filesystem that for some reason, when installed via package works fine, but if you try to build any projects using them willgive you nothing but trouble.

fdisk is out and handy.... Ubuntu is going back on my server, and Solaris can be kept for the Java Heads....