[freeside] My experience: Few flaws But I think I got it

Rick Parola rick at rpwebworks.com
Fri Mar 7 20:44:14 PST 2003


The road to getting up was getting too weird.

Cought by the "no can do 'till mod_perl2" by Ivan I started reworking the 
whole Idea. It seemed like it could have worked, the mod_perl 1.99_05 that 
comes in RH8 rpm is supposed to be a version "2" but I started getting very 
confused and certainly sure the docs weren't made for apache 2 plus, 
installing this then that than trying again and realizing I might have needed 
that too... I had lost track of what order I did things in and what I did.

I do need that install of apache 2 since that's the one I have perfected for 
my PHP needs with all the libraries, so I kept that but I took off all I 
added for freeside and uninstalled every single Cpan module and mod_perl, 
reinstalled the mod_perl for apache2 made sure that was ok.

Next, I armed myself with sources of apache 1.3 and mod_perl 1.27 and compiled 
a separate apache install with mod_perl and suexec built in (not as DSOs) 
just like I alwayst thought I'd keep doing it :-), I changed the port to a 
non standard port and made sure it worked fine and could coexist with the 
apache 2.

Then I started all over down the list of CPAN modules, for that, out of 
laziness and driven by the convenience of search I used webmin and I must say 
I usually prefer the shell but that was pretty handy and worked really nice 
(those who aren't familiar with webmin can check out www.webmin.com - RPMs 
Install in minutes and it's worth checking out for all kinds of 
administration tasks).

I installed all mods in order by the list as in the docs adding MLDBM and 
MLDBM::Sync between Net::SCP and Apache::ASSP as suggested by someone in this 
thread.

As someone mentioned all module names are called upon by CPAN with "::" 
instead of "-" and yes a couple are confusing, but a search on CPAN will find 
the module. Ivan has the official names of the modules on that list ie. the 
MailTools.tar.gz will get you the right module but there is NOT a 
Bundle::MailTools or MailTools...

The ones I found odd or confusing:
- libnet -> turnes out there is a Bundle::libnet
- libwww-perl -> Bundle::LWP
- MailTools -> Yeap, a weird one, no real package, just a few other packages 
together, turnes out installing the main one (the one on top of the list in 
the CPAN webpage) takes care of all them all that is Mail::Address
- TimeDate -> figure this, the module how you'd put it in the webmin is 
Date::Format and it will also install all the others.

Down the list of steps I went, much faster and smoother this 12th time I went 
I did forget to make set user freeside in httpd.conf at first but that was 
quicly fixed.

What took me a while to figure and aggravated the heck out of me (Sometimes I 
shouldn't wait to turn to the logs for an answer :-) ) was the: "su
freeside-adduser -c -h /path/to/htpasswd username"
step...
I just could not authenticate and freeside needs that, rightfully. I tried 
many ways, I even tried using plain old htpasswd on the same file, used other 
files I knew worked and compared them (silly me) and started looking at the 
source for who knows what... Then looked at the error log and started kicking 
myself!

Turned out, running that command as root made a file that belongs to root and, 
since it should be protected and not made readable by everyone, the server 
could not read it!  Merely changing owner to freeside fixed it!!

Is this normal?

Anyway, it's up now and it's time I start checking it out! :-)

Thanks for the help, I hope this saves someone some time.






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