Day: October 29, 2012

Some reboot issues
After the reboot last weekend, there was still a thing or two missing in the startup.
First of all, the PHP environment wasn’t set up, because the procedure that is invoked to do that, referred locations that I moved; and though I thought I had, it seems I forgot to change the procedure accordingly. Once that was settled, I could indeed startup the blogs (that rely on PHP).
The second I found today: The CMS I’m testing requires a number of logicals, all were setup and the executakle was properly installed, but there was one logical that was not defined: the location and name of the configuration file. It is actually on the original home directory, I could move it to the same location as where the executable resides, but defining a logical referring the file is a better (more VMS-like) solution. Plus, I don’t need to restart anything. So that was a simple solution as well – though it took some time to figue it out in the documentation (that’s one thing that is past of this investigation: update the content to the currrent state. It lacked some maintenance :))
VWCMS issues
Now that works again, but then I ran into an issue that took some considerable time to locate the problem: I would like a similar page as my current homepage but I found out that MSIE 9 doesn’t work properly. That is: the editor does show up, I can add data but all is lost on ‘publish’, except the title of the post. Clearly because this isn’t added by the editor but on hitting the ‘New Blog Entry’ button. I thought it was a generic issue, but Firefox works fine. (I sometimes have the same problem with the blogs, but there is something that makes a difference. At times, it’s ok, on other times it fails. “Don’t use MSIE, then” – but at times, I simply need it. Some sites rely on it… And switching between browsers just because of this behaviour isn’t always a good idea either. But that’s another story)
Anyway: Firefox does the trick, and so I can look deeper into my problem: How to display the latest blog entry on the home page, AFTER a generic content. There is a way to immediately show the blog entry but that does not allow display of fixed content the way I want it. At least, not the simple way. I’ll have to find out how to achieve the same principle as on the current site. I do have some ideas, now it’s time to test them.
It takes some time, but I’ll get there.
A bit more on the FTP problem
It’s not FTP itself that causes a problem. I tried the FTP client that comes with the terminal emulater I’m using, and though the interface is not as nice nor extensive as the one from WS-FTP, it is well doable to pass files form or to the VMS box – without a problem. For some reason, WS-FTP requires a lot of additional memory causing the Freepagelist to exhaust and pushing the system into thrashing. Anyway, it looks that way. The only real difference is that the conenction was done in PASSIVE mode, where the FTP client of the emulator runs in ACTIVE mode. Another thing to test – on another machine…:)