PHP and I Have Made Peace

Monday, November 21, 2005, at 09:27AM

By Eric Richardson

PHP and I have been fighting for the last three months. And that really hasn't mattered much to me, since I'm a Perl guy and I had very little I was actually using it for. It all started back in August, when some manual changes I made to Apache caused mod_php4 to start segfaulting. Then about a month ago I tried to make peace, but PHP wanted to go nuclear and get rid of my kernel.

The other day I got around to trying again, and worked through the apt dependency issues. I had to enable Force-LoopBreak (from the man page: SUCH A LOOP SHOULD NEVER EXIST AND IS A GRAVE BUG) and ask for e2fslibs, e2fsprogs, initrd-tools and libc6 to upgrade. Then everything was ok. But still mod_php4 segfaulted for me.

And now, finally, today I got PHP to play nice. I found error messages (when the module was installed but not enabled) suggesting that a pair of .so files were missing. I ran apt-get with the --reinstall option to make sure all the appropriate php files were in place, and all of a sudden things started working.

All this to get a piece of forum software working. If only I still wrote forum software.

Eric Richardson lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he works on payments infrastructure for Cash App.

Past lives involved streaming audio for Southern California Public Radio, running a hyperlocal news site for Downtown Los Angeles, working on custom mapping code, and writing Perl at the Jet Propulsion Labratory.

Previously on this date...

2005
Bike Show 2005
I went to the Bike Show yesterday, worried that the hour and a half or so I had until it closed might not be enough time. Well... It was, and then some...
The Immortal Class
A couple weeks ago Alan told me to check out Travis Hugh Culley's book The Immortal Class. It took me a while to get through, but yesterday during...
2001
Game 2: North Muskegon 5, Shelby 5
We started out by giving them four runs that probably shouldn't have been scored (I'm not sure how many were actually unearned), and then had to...
Game 1: North Muskegon 9, Shelby 4
We jumped out to an early lead, but couldn't quite finish the job without going the full seven innings. I did nothing spectacular, going 1-4 as a...
2000
autowrap
I have to say that after seeing this article about autowraps, I actually thought about signing up.
1999
the dark side...
now i really feel like i've given into the dark side... I just installed Windows 95. Granted, it was only onto a virtual drive to work inside vmware...