Tweaking SUSE

I am still tweaking Suse to my tastes. Exteneded my logical volume since I see Suse occupies more /opt space than Redhat/Fedora. Downloaded and installed azureus with latest JRE. Set up the wireless lan on my laptop and reading more about wireless networks and sniffers.

Switched over to SUSE linux 10.0 OSS

Yesterday I downloaded SUSE and installed on my laptop. It was a breeze and it works quite nicely. I had to do this since it has become a pain to keep Fedora Core 4 working. To finalize, I screwed up the rpm db but unable to restore to any state. SUSE is good and I am a first time user. Really impressed.
I installed gnucash and now trying to sort out my Dell Truemobile 1300 WLAN. As I am writing this, I am installing gcc, ndiswrapper to make it work. Broadcom 4306 is setup successfully.
I am trying to understand and use Gnucash, which is quite complex.

Enabling GD in windows for php

There was no clear cut document for the issues I faced today. So, I am writing this for my own reference also. This document is intended for php version 4.3.x and above running on Apache2 and the gd bundled with php itself.

Make sure after installing/untarring the php in a location other than server root/document root. Create a directory called php under c:/ and copy the following files to php4apache2.dll, php4ts.dll, php.exe and php.ini (php.inst-dist from the php installation dir).

Enable php in apache. Open the httpd.conf in your favourite editor (vim) and add index.php to DirectoryIndex directive.
DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php

Add another line to addType directive in httpd.conf
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Load the php SAPI as a module by adding this in httpd.conf
LoadModule php4_module “c:/php/php4apache2.dll”

Edit the php.ini file accordingly. The following should be updated. extensions should point to the extensions dir inside the php installation dir. If temp is not present, create temp folder.
doc_root = c:\apache\apache2\htdocs
extension_dir = c:\php\extensions
session.save_path = c:/temp

Uncomment the following line in php.ini.
extension=php_gd.dll

Finally copy the php.ini file to c:/windows dir.

Write a php file with the contents as below to check.
var_dump(gd_info());

MQ and php and perl

Finally I managed to write monitoring scripts for MQ. The architecture is a simple client-server architecture. Since the commands need to run as mq, there is a socket based server program which runs on the boxes where queue manager is hosted. I wrote this in perl since I dont have a standalone php installed in my middleware boxes. The web client is written in php, which will query the perl socket server for the details and get back the results in xml format. The xml format is parsed through and displayed as a simple table. The background colour of a row in a table indicates the health of queue/channel. It is a poorly written dirty script with all necessary blocks for security but still unfit to put in internet due to poor comments and unelegant style. If anybody wants a copy send me a mail nsupathy at gmail dot com.

Support Vs Development
After working in support for more than 2 years, I am of the view that each developer should go through a support phase in his/her career. The support point of view of the application is not given the importance as the maintenance of code base is given. The support personnel toil to know the inner workings of the application and sometimes resort to round about methods to do their work. Sometimes the errors are vague and misleading. The error messages thrown should be clear and legible for the support to find out the issues. If a developer has got enough experience in support, then they will know what the support people need.
I am not talking about product maintenance here. It is the support of custom built applications with a company. These applications never help the support people enough to do their job effectively.
I am not putting enought points or evidence here and leave it as a seperate article.

php bug
php bug has bitten me. Learning php and trying to write some scripts to automate my support work. perl is also getting mixed. It is a nice work and keeping me busy. Also planning to write a php interface to MQ. This will enable to administer MQ from the php enabled web front. It is in very nascent stage and the learning, implemetation curve is steep. This is currrently stopping me from reading my favourite books. Davinci Code is lying there in my table followed closly by Digital Fortress and yet to be read.

DCE becomes free
DCE is now released under Open Source licensing. The news is here http://www.opengroup.org/comm/press/05-01-12.htm. It is good for the old enterprise proprietary market. If someone ports dce to linux, then linux can truly break into enterprise middleware. Eventhough most of the companies switched from DCE to other latest technologies, it still lives in the back yard of many fortune 500 companies. Let us wait and see.
When I am writing this, it is snowing in Bristol.

Boxing day nightmares
I dont know, when I actually wrote I was feeling peaceful about the Christmas day passing good. The next day huge waves struck south east asia and India and took away many lives. My home state (Tamil Nadu) was the worst affected and I remained glued to television, called up friends to check whether they are safe. It was really a nightmare. Not finding suitable words to explain the situation.