General questions about install order and variants (Apache2, PHP5, PostgreSQL, mySQL)

Fri May 18 10:57:55 PDT 2007

[LENGTHY INCOHERENT RANT]

Some observations on my OSX software upgrade/install experience.  
Wonder if I am alone in these thoughts or anyone else has had similar  
nightmares...

Over time I've installed so many different versions software (mostly  
Apache, php, pgsql, and a myriad of dependencies) in the form of  
binaries & source installs on my workstation, and on the servers that  
after a while I began to feel that I had no clue what's what, or what  
was where, a big unruly mix and match...

Over time there have been a number of binaries,  some better than  
others. At first I tried binaries from marc liyanage, and others, and  
the problem for me with the binaries was :
( 1 ) that you were always from moderately behind, to far behind the  
current versions.
( 2 ) by their nature there's no choice on where, what options,  
versions, etc are installed.

Some people put a great deal of effort into creating these binaries,  
and for the most part grateful as you were that someone took the  
time, they never quite solved the problem.

I began installing from source and found that to be an excercise in  
total frustration. If you did a simple
./configure (with maybe a couple of simple options)
./make
./sudo make install

things might install as advertised, but even then you might get  
failures because you are missing some dependency, or you don't have  
the correct version of openssl, or libxml, or some other such thing  
and the install requires a later version. Not to even mention all the  
warnings the compiler doles out about unsigned variables, etc.

Sometimes when you get involved in what you feel is going to be a 30  
minute deal, and three days later at 3:15 am you've installed a boat- 
load of dependent software, you're on the last leg and the last one  
just refuses to compile with some cryptic message. You begin to feel  
like you're inside a huge snowball rolling down the mountain totally  
out of control, and there's a big giant Sequoia at the bottom, and  
you just know it's got you name on it. Now you have all this stuff  
installed that won't work and the only choice is to re-format/erase  
the drive and restore from the latest backup to try to get back to  
where you were 72 hours prior. Get that started and go to bed, and  
hope the next day you'll feel better...

I have had success installing from source, but sometimes the cryptic  
errors were too much, and I just gave up. The pain was too great!

I would spend a couple of days trying to install something like gd2  
in order to have support for graphics buttons on the fly in php only  
to find the dependencies and cryptic errors to be an excercise in  
total frustration. After a while there are umpteen instances of php  
and the associated support files installed by the OS, FINK, MAMP,  
entropy, Zend, and others. It is absolutely mind-blowing when you  
search your entire drive for httpd.conf, or php.ini the number of  
items found.

Even when I installed what should have been a simple install of "rpl"  
which does a simple unix replace string, I had to go back and forth  
with the author overcoming some error messages until I finally got it  
to install correctly. One of the huge problems is that unless you  
have the discipline to write excellent notes, and file them  
appropriately, so that the next time you need to do this again on a  
new machine a year down the road, you're going to be in for the same  
problem all over again...

And there's always the broken links to dilyib.a.this and diliyb.that,  
that you can never figure out what they are for, why there are so  
many links, which ones are still valid, what's garbage and can be  
cleaned out?. What needs to be configured for access to shared  
libraries and what doesn't. Every now and then you get lucky and do  
an $ "ln -s /real_here /alias_there" and you manage to get broken  
links working.

The funny part is that I consider myself a reasonably intelligent  
guy, have a degree in Aerospace Engineering with Honors from the  
University of Florida, worked as an Engineer/Scientist on the Saturn/ 
Apollo Program (Apollo VIII thru Apollo XII) during the late 60's whe  
we trying to get to the Moon, I learned to fly, got every flight  
rating imaginable including an ATR, flight instructed and went on to  
become an Airline Pilot for Eastern Airlines for many years.  I have  
been programming the Mac almost fulltime since 1987 in about a dozen  
languages including Motorola 6800 Assembly, Pascal, C, C++, etc. So I  
tend to think that I am not the average user, and I still run into  
huge problems. Which makes me feel bad for the average person trying  
to deal with this crap. That having been said, life should not be  
this overly complicated in the year 2007, which brings me back to the  
cryptic messages. This is absurdity, as long as computers have been  
around we should be at a point where upgrades to OS installed  
software do not represent a major crisis in the life and self esteem  
of an average person...

My wife recently took a weeklong course on security from the SANS  
Institute at http://www.sans.org/, and I've been listening to the  
"Sans OnDemand" home study portion since her workstation is right  
beside mine. The intructor's name is "Stephen Northcutt" who is an  
incredibly amazing individual. He's been involved in every aspect of  
computer life as we know it today at the foundation rule defining  
levels.

I used to think I was reasonably safe behind the routers/firewalls,  
and behind the OSX Server Firewalls until I began reading all the  
daily vulnerability reports. In fact since I do this as a hobby now,  
I shutdown all the servers the other day, and ordered a new SonicWall  
TZ 180 Wireless, which supposedly will allow me to encrypt all  
wireless access from my workstation or laptop at home. This course  
that my wife took, and the "Sans OnDemand" stuff is really worth the  
money. I used to think it would be nice to shell out the multi- 
thousand dollars for Cisco, only to find out that it doesn't matter  
what you have, it's all vulnerable, whether it's Cisco, SonicWall,  
etc. the only hope we have is defense in depth. For those of us that  
can write shell scripts, but are not in the super-guru category, the  
opportunities that wrong flag or something to that effect can produce  
is vulnerability issue is far too real.

When I started doing this, if you were a programmer you could make  
really good money. Now that so much of the programming has gone  
overseas, and everybody and their brother writes some level software,  
a course like this really wakes you up to the realization that even  
the average user's computer is in great peril of being used as a  
parking source to robots, hackers, worms, trojans, etc. from which to  
launch their attacks. I used to think my stuff was reasonably safe,  
being OSX based, and after this course I can see that I've been in  
the land of OZ.

I always feel like my PHD is in bufoonery, in the sense that I've  
made every mistake that could possibly be made, and yet I  continue  
to punish myself. If I had any strength of character at all,  I would  
pitch the computer out the window, and go fly my little airplane.  
Maybe take a short flight to Okahome, and go eat some lunch at one of  
the local airports, or fly down to the Bahamas...

What a happy life I had before I bought my first TI 16  
something_or_other, before the Commodore 64 and the Aplle II  
computers. I can truthfully say that have sucked the very life out of  
my soul, they were supposed to make life easier, supposed to help us  
have more free time, huh ? OS X has made things a lot better in some  
respects, and  worse in others. We don't suffer crashes 3 times a day  
any more, that's good...

... and cell phones ? People go on vacation, and stick an uggly  
contraption in their ear so they can  stay in touch with work, while  
they are trying to take their kids on a ride at Disney World. Couple  
of months ago one of my friends went on a Photo Safari to Africa, and  
prior to leaving got a Satellite Phone to stay in touch onboard ship,  
and out in the wild, and took their laptop so they could stay  
connected.  I thought to myself "This is insane! They better be  
paying attention to the wildlife so some Lion doesn't have them for a  
snack while they are keeping in touch with work.". Anyway, I thought  
"Are you crazy, or what ? Why don't you just stay home, forget the  
vacation, just go to work and save yourself the trouble ?" Something  
is very wrong with this picture, but it's not unusual...

In my lifetime I have seen free time vanish from human existence,  
except in France.

Anyway, great as the Mac has been, Apple has done a very poor job in  
providing help to upgrade the ancient versions of software that come  
with the OS. They install dark age versions of all kinds of things  
and never seem to have a path to upgrade any of this stuff. The user  
has to resort to things like FINK, etc. which puts stuff in non- 
standard locations "/sw".

Even things like installing MacPorts last night. After reading the  
intructions about merging the ~/.bash_profile into the ~/.profile  
that MacPorts creates, I followed the instructions, merged and  
deleted ~/.bash_profile and could not get the bash terminal to use  
~/.profile. I restarted it terminal, and even restarted the machine  
to see if that would help, and it didn't so I renamed ~/.profile back  
to ~/.bash_profile and got that work. The problem is that it is not  
clear where MacPorts will then expect ~/.profile to be there.

A while ago I had added as the last line in my ~/.bash_profile the  
following:

echo $(curl -s http://checkip.dyndns.org/ | sed -e 's/[^0-9\.]*// 
g') ; echo $( ifconfig | grep broadcast | awk '{ print $2 }')

and that was not displaying, so I knew that ~/.profile was not  
loading correctly. I tried to find out where ~/.profile was specified  
as the startup document and found the Terminal Preferences has a  
checkbox and a field : "Open a saved .termfile when Terminal starts :  
_______________" and maybe you are supposed to enter ~/.profile there.

In my opinion Apple is in a perfect position to know where  
everything, and I mean EVERYTHING (pathwise, and dependency wise) is  
located since they shipped it installed. So that even if they are not  
going to handle the upgrades from Apache 1.3 on OSX, or Apache 2.0.52  
on OSX Server, or openssl .96d, or php 4.x to the current versions,  
they should have some really good instructions on how to replace and  
upgrade the existing outdated versions. Shamefully they don't do  
anything of the sort...

Perhaps if you are a home user with an iMac or a laptop you can get  
by with Apache 1.3, (we're talking 4 or 5 years after Apache 2 became  
available) but certainly if you are shelling out a bunch of money for  
OSX Server, Apple should be more forthcoming. Their policy seems to  
be install it and forget. The user won't notice how ancient this  
stuff is, and even if they do "We'll just tell them that's not part  
of the 90 day support"...

A couple of weeks ago I bought a new Intel iMacG5 and was not  
surprised that they still had ancient versions of software right out  
of the box...

It's hard for me to believe that Apple is totally unconcerned with  
this problem. In my opinion Apple's lack of interest in maintaining  
the software packages they pre-install with the OS up to date is  
shameful. I do not think they should be responsible for any user  
installed stuff, but they should certainly provide a way to keep  
software that comes with the OS up to date, such as the software  
previously mentioned...

Enough for my thoughts on this issue. I aplogize for repeating  
myself, particularly in  the use of the word "shameful"...

[GENERAL QUESTIONS]

So far I reformatted my primary drive, installed all the licensed  
applications, downloaded MacPorts installed the following :  
"SuccessFully, I might add. Yeah for the MacPorts Team"

[2007.18.05](09:08AM) -> [bhernandez] ~ $ port list installed
expat                          @2.0.0          textproc/expat
fontconfig                     @2.4.2          graphics/fontconfig
freetype                       @2.3.4          print/freetype
gd2                            @2.0.34         graphics/gd2
jpeg                           @6b             graphics/jpeg
libiconv                       @1.11           textproc/libiconv
libpng                         @1.2.18         graphics/libpng
ncurses                        @5.6            devel/ncurses
ncursesw                       @5.6            devel/ncursesw
openssl                        @0.9.8e         devel/openssl
readline                       @5.2.001        devel/readline
rpl                            @1.4.0          textproc/rpl
zlib                           @1.2.3          archivers/zlib
[2007.18.05](09:49AM) -> [bhernandez] ~ $

Before I install (Apache2, PHP5, PostgreSQL, mySQL) I wanted to find  
out if there was a preferred way of doing this ?

It seems like PHP should be last because of the --with APXS2 that  
requires a path  to Apache, but in this case where MacPorts knows  
where everything is going to be installed anyway maybe it doesn'  
matter ?

Anyway MacPorts has handled all the ugly stuff so far, and I don't  
want to screw up the remaining installs....

Any ideas what variants I should use, I didn't find where the  
information is stored, about what the different variants do, and  
which one I should choose ?

( 1 ) iMacG5 workstation - OSX 10.4.9 (Apache 2.0.52, php, postgreSQL)
( 2 ) G4 - OSX Server 10.3.9 (This one runs a 4D WebServer)
( 3 ) G4 - OSX Server 10.4.9 (This one runs Apache 2.0.52, php,  
postgreSQL)

When I use the bash terminal to find out about what options are  
available for Apache2:

[2007.18.05](07:13AM) -> [bhernandez] ~ $ port variants Apache2
Apache2 has the variants:
         universal
         darwin
         darwin_7
         openbsd
         openldap
         preforkmpm
         workermpm
         eventmpm
         no_startupitem
[2007.18.05](07:17AM) -> [bhernandez] ~ $

I think I've gotten completely burned out beyond help...

Best Regards,

Bill Hernandez
Plano, Texas