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These posts are the creation of Doran L. Barton (AKA Fozziliny Moo). To learn more about Doran, check out his website at fozzilinymoo.org.

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Castro gets a face lift

Posted: 21 March 2004 at 02:22:04

Iodynamics’ main server, Castro (we name all our servers after famous dictators), has been running Red Hat 7.1 since... well, since Red Hat 7.1 came out. It’s been a while.

I’ve been wanting to install some bigger hard drives in that server for a while as well. As a result, we’ve been planning on upgrading the hardware and software and I’ve been dreading the operation because I wasn’t entirely sure how long we’d be down, if I should try to set up a temporary server to handle things while Castro was down, etc.

Well, yesterday, I did it. I put in the new drives, built a new software RAID array and installed a fresh installation of Fedora Core 1 on the new array. Then, I mounted the old RAID array under the /backup directory and restored user accounts, e-mail, databases, websites, etc.

I continued restoring services and files last night and today. For the most part, everything’s worked fine. There is one problem and, fortunately, it only affects Iodynamics staff. We’ve used a secure web-based file server application for file sharing and the application (Apache::FileManager) depends on mod_perl version 1.x and Fedora Core 1 installs mod_perl v2.x. Well, Apache::FileManager wont’ work at all with mod_perl v1.x so I had a great idea (or what I thought was a great idea) of setting up a separate Apache v1.3.x server on the server with mod_perl v1.x running in it and run Apache::FileManager on a private port and then use Apache’s ProxyPass directive to have the Apache v1.3.x server handle all the file server stuff.

The Apache v1.3.x and mod_perl v1.x installation and configuration went flawlessly. Once they were configured and running, I could access the file server application via the private port just fine so I configured the Apache v2.x server to do the ProxyPass directive and gave it a whirl.

It was at that point that all the blood in my body drained into my feet.

Well, it wasn’t that dramatic, but it became pretty obvious that I didn’t think about the implications of having both mod_perl v1.x and mod_perl v2.x installed on the same machine: namespace corruption.

I tried cleaning up the mess I had made to no avail. In the end (after 2 hours or so of trying), I ended up uninstalling the perl RPM and all the Perl module RPMs, doing an rm -rf on the /usr/lib/perl5 directory, and then reinstalling Perl and all the Perl module RPMs as well as mod_perl v2.x. After that, I was back to having a functional web server, but the file server application still didn’t work.

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do about this. I could use another Iodynamics server as a dedicated Apache v1.3.x server and run all stuff that requires mod_perl v1.x on that server, but I’d rather not.