On 6 Oct, Young, Geoffrey S. wrote:
> well, I spent a coupla days trying to recall my first days in mod_perl and I
> remembered a few pitfalls not in the Guide. Since I have seen other users
> on this list encounter the same questions, I thought I'd bring them up...
>
> 1) getting mod_perl RPMs to work under Linux
> 2) figuring out exactly what things are needed to sucessfully compile
> apache/mod_perl from source (not necessarily Linux specific).
>
> I'll explain...
>
> Being (more then than now) slightly RedHat/RPM impaired, I wanted to
> have a mod_perl enabled Apache server. If you install the Apache RPM boom,
> apache is working. Now, there is a mod_perl RPM as well (on my 5.2 discs,
> that is). However, when I installed it went about the guide's "How do I
> know mod_perl is working" stuff, no luck. It eventually led me to
> installing from both apache and mod_perl source from CPAN (the right thing
> to do). Anyway, being new to the whole sys admin stuff, it took me the
> better part of a day to figure out that I needed gcc, make, glibc or
> whatever to be able to compile the stuff (picture, installing gcc RPM,
> trying to compile, installing glibc RPM, trying to compile...). I still am
> not sure what exact packages are necessary, eventually I just installed
> everything that looked appropriate.
>
Under RedHat 6.0 the RPM's install fine. However, you need to edit
httpd.conf to load the modules and srm.conf to enable the handlers.
mod_perl is enabled after you restart the server. One one of my
machines, mod_perl works fine 99% of the time, on the other the child
processes ended up seg faulting on every request. I then had to
recompile from source. No problems with this - I followed the INSTALL
file and linked mod_perl statically. Worked perfectly. The tar-balls
seem to be the best option, and from an organisational point of view,
I like to be able to specify what my directory tree should look like.
> At any rate, I have seen others struggle with installing apache and
> mod_perl from the RPM, having no luck, then trying to compile from the RPM
> source, still having trouble. My advice to these folks is to abandon the
> RPM and go to CPAN. I don't know of anyone who has managed to do this
> successfully (but I love to hear about it). Occasionally, those people also
> don't have the right packages installed necessary to compile from source. I
> pretty much tell them I just started installing stuff and eventually it
> worked, but I wished I could offer them a difinitive list.
Hear, hear!
>
> Thus, it might be worth mentioning that RPMs are a _bad_ idea for
> those just getting into mod_perl. That is, unless others have been more
> successful that I...
>
> Comments?
>
> --Geoff
>
--
John Reid
Senior Analyst/Programmer
Open Connect (Ireland) Ltd
http://www.openconnect.ie/
