Switching…

Just a small post to let you know about some updates that where released today. First the Courier IMAP server has had a minor upgrade which solves some minor issues (which hadn’t troubled me yet). But it’s good to know and I’ll be upgrading later this evening. You can get the new version 4.1.1 from http://www.courier-mta.org/download.php.

Second update is a new update of the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. This plug-in is a real time saver as is keeps 99% of all spam from showing up in my blog as you might have noticed. It’s up to version 1.15 and the changes are more cosmetical than functional and you can get it here. If you are running a WordPress blog you really can’t do without.

Just read on the Apple Developers site that the Xcode developer tools that Xcode 2.3 has been released.

Xcode 2.3 adds support for the DWARF debugging format for enhanced debugging fidelity. This release also includes stability and performance improvements to the Xcode IDE, build system, and Code Sense. It is recommended that all Xcode users install this update. Please see the attached release notes for further information and system requirements.

GCC has been updated as well, the new version included in this version is 4.0.1. Read the release note on this version here to see if it affects you. I don’t know if this release solves my previous problem with compiling on the Intel platform and if it still needs the ‘-arch i386′ option.

By the way, the download is a big one, it’s 915 MB.

After spending more time helping Andy Vestergård to get everything working on his new Intel Mac mini we ran into problems compiling Postfix with MySQL support together with TLS/SSL support. In the linking phase of compiling Postfix we got many errors warning us about multiple definitions of symbols being used like:

/usr/bin/ld: multiple definitions of symbol _SSL_CTX_set_timeout
/usr/lib/libssl.0.9.7.dylib(ssl_sess.o) definition of _SSL_CTX_set_timeout
/usr/local/mysql/lib/libmysqlclient.a(ssl.o) definition of _SSL_CTX_set_timeout in section (__TEXT,__text)

It took me quite some time to locate the origin of this problem and ‘m sad to say that the cause lies with MySQL. In the lib directory of the MySQL installation there are no more shared libraries only static ones. There is even a bug being reported about this problem back in 2005 and it still isn’t solved. The remark being put there is to compile it yourself if you need it. I looked at the 5.0.x packages they provided both for PPC and Intel and the error is still there.

I guess this means I have to write documentation on how to compile your own binary of MySQL. This will delay the v2 documentation for some time…

Well, I’ve spend some time since yesterday helping Andy Vestergård to get everything compiled and running on his new Dual Core Mac mini. He started with Apache, PHP and Mysql. Apache seemed to compile fine but when trying to start it it would just die and give you a segmentation error as he reported yesterday here.

The compilation process looked allright. The ‘./configure’ command looked like it detected it should be compiling for an Intel based darwin environment. But still we couldn’t start it up. After trying all sorts of things, and reading through the developer documentation at Apple.com on porting unix applications to OS X.

When I googled on some terms and found this post on Marc Liyanage’s site. It seemed that the gcc compiler still needs an extra flag to tell it to compile properly for Intel. You need to add:

CFLAGS="-arch ppc -arch i386"

to the configure command to create universal binaries. It’s still strange how we need to tell the compiler to compile for Intel as it should do this by default. I guess this is a minor bug of some sort that will be solved in a later release of OS X or the XTools.

We are still struggling with mailserver but Apache, MySQL and PHP are running smoothly.

Just noticed the jumping software update icon in the dock of my server which I regularly check using Chicken of the VNC. It looks from the knowledge base article that this is mostly an update to prevent security breaches with malicious code using buffer overflow problems. The items that where updated included: AppKit, Bom, CFNetwork, ClamAV, CoreFoundation, CoreGraphics, libcurl, Finder, FTP-Server, KeyChain, ImageIO, LaunchServices, QuickDraw, Ruby and Safari.

I’ve updated the Mac mini server and there were no noticeable issues after installing the update.

Just a short post, I had a lot of questions from people on how they should go forward setting up websites on their newly installed Apache2 webserver. I had documented how to do this for the postfix mailserver from the beginning of this project. So here is the long overdue documentation that makes it all clear on how to setup name-based virtual hosts on Mac OS X. This by the way works for all versions of Apache.

Well did I miss this one completely. I thought I had myself subscribed to all the announcement mailinglists of all the software I use in my setup so I would not miss any important updates or security issues. Because I was trying to download the source code of PHP to retry the installation procedure to see if I missed something I noticed the difference in version numbers. I was still expecting version 5.1.2 and I noticed I missed 2 versions as there is now version 5.1.4. Somehow 5.1.4 followed 5.1.3 very quickly because of some bugs that where found. You can read all about the issues, bugs, etc.. in the changelog. (more…)

I’ve received a flyer in one of the magazines I read that said I would get a 50 euro budget for free when I sign up for Google AdWords. It has been lying on my desk for a few weeks while I kept wondering what I could do with 50 euro. This week I thought why not give it a try, never really expected I would get it as I’m not usually lucky in getting stuff like this. But to my surprise today I got an email that my request has been accepted and I got a personal code for 50 euro when I signed up. So I directly signed up for AdWords to see if it worked and now I’ve got a AdWords marketing budget of 50 euro !
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It’s a weird feeling having to blog again about a MySQL update, but due to security issues MySQL has been updated. The current release is 5.0.21 and you can get it from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/. I’ve thinking a lot on how to do this and even thought I could just skip it. I don’t want to bombard you with update after update and only blog when something significant happens. But as this is a security driven update concerning the client-server protocol I though it was serious enough to mention here.

I’ve updated the installation procedure again to reflect the version change.