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The Perl King

I had 5 minutes of technical glory today, where I felt like I mastered the machine. The rest of the day I may have been under its thumb, where I belong.

Readers may note that a few weeks back I was dealing with some strange web server activity every Saturday morning that managed to take out my XServe that runs this blog, Feed2JS, and our eportfolio service. The man from Apple said, "Stick a Fork in It", so 2 days before leaving town for a conference, I was re-installing a new OS volume (all the data resided separately).

Everything was up and running except for the pesky perl modules (DBI and DBD) that MovableType needs to use mySQL database. I tried:

* command line cpan (failed)
* fink /fink commanded (installed but not in directories available to MT)
* The Mac OS X installer for DBD::mysql (and Bundle::DB) downloaded from http://www.heavyhosting.net/AppToolkit/index.html?main=downloads.html except that the page/site is gone. I think I used it last time I built the server
* cpan again and again
* I bugged D'Arcy and Derek a few time

Nothing seemes to work.

But something happened once I left town, as all of a sudden the server was coasting along as it should be.

Except today when I downloaded and installed a security update. On restart, I got the suite of perl error messages about not being able to find DBI.pm and MovableType was hung.

It turned out to be simple-- digging down to where cpan stored all of the install files for DBI. A run through the README led to a series of command line scripts to run to create the DBI library. It was EASY, and it worked.

I am the perl god king (for maybe 4 minutes).