Routing around the documentation

As I bring a new server online with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I'm reminded again that it would be impossible to use this operating system without weblogs, Google, and Google Groups. Even the most thoroughly documented version of Linux leaves holes that can only be answered by random Internet geeks.

After failing for an hour to install the Perl module DBI::mysql, I found out from Jason Leftkowitz that I should unset the LANG variable, because for unknown reasons it angers the CPAN gods.

Another trip through Google found a meaty discussion on Simon Willison's weblog about whether to heed the PHP Group's ominous warning to never run PHP under Apache 2.0 in a production environment.

My Apache 2.0 server was installed with the non-threading, pre-forking module that works like 1.3, which is a relief. When I thought I had to downgrade to Apache 1.3 with all of the attendant hassles, I was forking mad.

2004/05/16 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

Hello! I got your trackback to my post about Red Hat's strange LANG issue... boy, am I glad to hear that saved you some time. You have no idea how much time I wasted digging through Google Groups, etc. before figuring it out. So if the post cuts the wasted time down from many hours to one hour, I figure that's progress :-)

#1 · Jason Lefkowitz · 2004/05/17

Thanks. I like Red Hat Linux, but they come up with some strange incongruities between their OS and other Linuxes. This reminds me of the problems that "localhost.localdomain" used to cause me in MySQL.

#2 · Rogers Cadenhead · 2004/05/17

Ah, the LANG issue. So annoying, I recall taking over a hour to figure that one out. Per your PHP and Apache 2.0 comment, although according to the PHP documentation users are warned against using this combination in a production environment, I've run it in a high-traffic, mission critical environment for well over a year. Have had absolutely zero problems.

#3 · Jason Gilmore · 2004/05/23