Maintenance

MC changed the include_path and extension_dir settings -- it appears there was an update in May, at which time these should have been changed but weren't. However, the app still won't work. There are two remaining settings that look wrong to me:

MYSQL_INCLUDE     no value
MYSQL_LIBS     no value 

On a phpinfo.php for PHP5, these show as:

MYSQL_INCLUDE     -I/usr/local/include/mysql
MYSQL_LIBS     -L/usr/local/lib/mysql -lmysqlclient 

I'm waiting to see if a fix to these will do the job. If not, we'll have to start picking carefully through every one of the settings, trying to figure out what might be wrong. The only other thing I can think of is that PEAR might be broken somehow in this new install.

In the long run, we should get Agenda shifted from PHP4 to PHP5. If this update was done in May, and we're the first to report that the paths were broken, then clearly hardly anyone is using it any more.

This morning I was contacted by two different departments to report that the Agenda application used to schedule classes is not working. On investigation, I discovered that the login page is truncated immediately at the point where the first call to the database is made. After reading through the code, I couldn't see anything wrong, so I suspected a connection problem such as an ACL issue between web.uvic.ca/lang and csmgenr2 (the mysql server). The db is there, functioning, and accessible through PhpMyAdmin.

I raised a ticket with sysadmin, and MC got back to me to say that there doesn't seem to be a connection issue, but the error in the logs was with a PHP include:

2012-08-29T08:43:23-07:00 local@axolotl.comp.uvic.ca user.notice php_cgi: PHP
Warning: main() [<a href='function.include'>function.include</a>]: Failed
opening 'DB.php' for inclusion
(include_path='.:/usr/local/php-4.4.8/include/php:/usr/local/php-4.4.8/lib/php')
in
/home3/80/lang/www/agenda/Application_Files/script_files/php/database_connection.php
on line 11

The error comes when the db connection script tries to include DB.php, which is the PEAR library this project uses for accessing MySql. This sent me to check the PHP settings info in phpinfo.php, and I found a number of oddities:

• The PHP version is 4.4.9,
• the configure command output includes this: './configure' '--prefix=/usr/local/php-4.4.9', and
• the configuration file is here: /usr/local/php-4.4.9/lib/php.ini.
• HOWEVER, the extension_dir is /usr/local/php-4.4.8/lib/php/extension, and
• the include_path is .:/usr/local/php-4.4.8/include/php:/usr/local/php-4.4.8/lib/php.

My current theory is that when PHP was updated from 4.4.8 to 4.4.9, those key settings in the master php.ini file should have been changed, but weren't; and as a result, the include of DB.php is failing. I've reported this back to sysadmin, and I'm waiting for a response. In the meantime, I've tried overriding the include_path setting in a local php.ini, but I can't get that to work; perhaps those settings can't be overridden.

In the meantime, I could no longer bear to look at the logo which proclaimed "Agenda / Organize. Mangage. Simplfy" (sic, seriously), so I've fixed that.

Just blogging something I keep having to look up. This is how to switch your SVN repo from the old tapor URL to hcmc:

svn switch --relocate https://revision.tapor.uvic.ca/svn/[reponame] https://revision.hcmc.uvic.ca/svn/[reponame] 

Just blogging this so that the next time I forget it, I don't have to rediscover it again:

• Set up a Compose Key -- I use Right Alt -- in Keyboard Layout/Options.
• Type accented characters by holding down that key while you type the combining symbol (e.g. backtick) followed by the character (e.g. e), then release to get the char. NOTE: sometimes you have to type them in the other order (character first, then diacritic key).