Month: January 2008

Licenses renewed
On 27 january, all VMS licenses expired, but the new ones had already arrived some weeks ago. But I didn’t install them yet, and the funny part is that I ran into a problem when I tried to login tonight: All services were still active and could be used – no matter what I did: Mail worked, the spamfiltered worked, there has been no trouble using the webserver…
Login interactively however failed – a connection could not be made using Telnet, nor SSH. Logging in on the console didn’t work either – it’s actually the DecWindows terminal, not a real console… – nor did ^P. But before doing anything else, I tried FTP to pass the licenses – and because all services were still running, that worked.
So using the RESET button and booting conversational was the only way to go. After booting, it showed licenses were expired – as expected – and I could simply launch the licensing procedure. After I revered the startup parameter, I rebooted the system.
Apart from a few missing, and wrongly defined logicals, everything canme up as intended. The few things things that failed were easily fixed – both intercatively and in the files – so that part is now fixed.

PHPGedView installed
To facilitate updates to the genalogical data, I would like to install a PHP program for retrieval and (logged in) update of this data. I had downloaded PHPGedView, installed it and tried to have it run. Alas, somewhere it crashes the PHP engine. That’s something to get into….

IssoNoHo
This partnersitye seems to be oggline again, so I disabled the link…

Power fail and the aftermath
This afternoon another power failure occurred – its cause is still a mystery – and Diana didn’t start all by itself. The usual problem, I assume: The Alpha trying to boot when the disks aren’t ready yet.

Of course, I was elsewhere, experiencing the outage while working. It couldn’t come on a less appropiate moment, I had to give a presentation on webservers on OpenVMS and wanted the system as an example on how to set things up.

Luckily, my son was able to help me out being instructed by phone. We found out reset didn’t seem to do anything, but power cycle did – in one go, for a change.

Within 10 minutes the system was up and running again – except for the webserver, to start with. I could access Diana by SSH so I had the opprotunity to settle that: It turned out the WASD server image wasn’t fully built, as it seemed. Rebuilding the server solved that problem (all files and procedures were still present). Mail and the operator entry now did work, and so did the static pages. PHP however kept failing: image PHPWASDSHR could not be activated – a good example of WASD’s WATCH utility – to locate the cause of error in ‘real time’. I used that.

But solving the problem would have to wait untill after the presentation, when I got home.

What could have been a cause of trouble, was a clean-up done some time ago, and rebuilding the WASD server might have changed file protections. In the end, it did for some directories, but whatever I tried, the problem kept appearing oin all PHP code (blogs, forum and PHPMyadmin). Showing the PHP environment (PHP-Info) showed that MySQL wasn’t loaded at all, despite all protection and logical names were properly defined.

A sudden idea made me run the PHP-code directlky using the PHP.EXE. This immediately showed what happened: a message either overlooked, or not outputted, when the index.php file is accessed over the web: The MYSQL41.EXE file was not valid as an PHP library file.

This triggered memory: I’d seen the same error after building the MySQL 4.1 engine, when any of the linked sharable images was missing – or didn’t reside on SYS$LIBRARY.

So I took a look on what has to be defined:

$ DEFINE/SYS/EXEC /NOLOG LIBZ_SHR32 sys$library:libzshr32-1_2_3_ev56.exe
$ DEFINE/SYS/EXEC /NOLOG LIBSSL sys$library:OPENSSL098A_LIBSSL_SHR32.exe
$ DEFINE/SYS/EXEC /NOLOG LIBCRYPTO sys$library:OPENSSL098A_LIBCRYPTO_SHR32.EXE


I checked the existence of each of these three files and found LIBZ_SHR32 non-existing – at least, the file got another name: libzshr.exe.
After changing this logical to

$ DEFINE/SYS/EXEC /NOLOG LIBZ_SHR32 sys$library:libzshr.exe

the problem was solved.
When trying to access WordPress as next action, MySQL crashed, and I found it had crashed due to tye same error: LIBZ_SHR32 did refer a non-existing file. But once restarted by the watchdog, I could enter this blog entry without a problem.

This file was renamed to build Clamav… But since LIBZ_SHR32 now refers to an existing file. it look as if all images using this image, are now up and running.

Minor changes

Asked for some explanation about the way the PHP RunTimeEnvironment works, and Mark gave some examples on how to set things up. I could do one change: starting the PHP engine directly, without .COM file, but the mapping example he send didn’t work for me: It won’t display the admin pages at all. No error, it just doesn’t show up. Well, it might be a matter of moving some mapping rules but it’s too late in the evening to work around it. So I left it as it was – just added one line so a trailing slash is no more needed. www.grootersnet.nl/sysblog will just work.

Most of the time I’ve been busy trying to get the IO for the webpage program running. Weird things happen, but I’ll get around it. It’s manly a matter of the right semantics, nothing problematic. The only thing is that SIZE () returns a bigger size (88) then expected (80). Something with slackbytes, perhaps.

Clamav
A new version has been announced on OpenVMS.org. The package has been downloaded and built, but it must still be integrated within the mail system.

There is a slight problem with it. When you download the package, it has a .GZ extension, but gunzip will fail. I experimented a bit and found it to be a normal ZIP file – VMS based. After having the file renamed to .ZIP, it unzipped nicely.
Be sure to have two extra packages downloaded: BZIP (from the same site) and LIBZ – that will be mentioned when you run the CONFIGURE procedure. The latter needs te be downloaded from another location – Alexei tells you where.
Once these packages have been downloaded and places in the appropitae locations, the CONFIGURE script will complete and yoú can start the BUILD procedure.
I got quite a number of warnings and informationals in compilation – and therfore, when LINKing, you’ll be informed again. But it might have to be related to teh C-compiler veriosn I;m using (7.3 on Alpha) and VMS version (8.3).
Anyway: it’s built and seems to run.

(A more detailed dewscription will follow later on)

BTW. the VAMP site seems to be down again…:(

Another crash of MySQL

This morning, in trying to access the blog to enter something (editing the previous post)., MySQL broke – again:

InnoDB: Thread 82752192 stopped in file MYSQL_ROOT:[innobase.include]sync0sync.
mysqld got signal 10;
This could be because you hit a bug. It is also possible that this binary
or one of the libraries it was linked against is corrupt, improperly built,
or misconfigured. This error can also be caused by malfunctioning hardware.
We will try our best to scrape up some info that will hopefully help diagnose
the problem, but since we have already crashed, something is definitely wrong
and this may fail.

key_buffer_size=8388608
read_buffer_size=131072
max_used_connections=5
max_connections=100
threads_connected=2
It is possible that mysqld could use up to
key_buffer_size + (read_buffer_size + sort_buffer_size)*max_connections = 72191
bytes of memory
Hope that's ok; if not, decrease some variables in the equation.

InnoDB: Thread 72282816 stopped in file MYSQL_ROOT:[innobase.include]sync0sync.
InnoDB: Thread 72233664 stopped in file MYSQL_ROOT:[innobase.os]os0sync.c;1 lin
%CMA-F-EXIT_THREAD, current thread has been requested to exit
%TRACE-F-TRACEBACK, symbolic stack dump follows
image module routine line rel PC abs PC
PTHREAD$RTL 0 000000000004367C FFFFFFFF8126367C
PTHREAD$RTL 0 000000000006E9E8 FFFFFFFF8128E9E8
0 FFFFFFFF8016F094 FFFFFFFF8016F094
0 FFFFFFFF80376E0C FFFFFFFF80376E0C
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 00000000001D2DC4 FFFFFFFF8146ADC4
DECC$SHR_EV56 0 00000000001D2A8C FFFFFFFF8146AA8C
0 FFFFFFFF8018780C FFFFFFFF8018780C
0 FFFFFFFF8018780C FFFFFFFF8018780C
----- above condition handler called with exception 0000000C:
%SYSTEM-F-ACCVIO, access violation, reason mask=00, virtual address=00000000000
----- end of exception message
0 FFFFFFFF800A911C FFFFFFFF800A911C
and more stack data

Virtual addres 0 – and therefore ACCVIO.
I Think I found something: the MYSQL database itself seems to be MYISAM. I had installed it requesting INNODB, if I recall correctly! This is something to look into.
Anyway, in 10 minutes the watcher started it agaan to I couild do my editing about 10 minutes later.

On the web front: The program is progessing slowly. The IO routines on RMS files have been coded, except for one or two more routines. Ready to test them – after writing a driver for it.