It continually amazes me how much brain damage can be incurred in updating ones system. And amazingly enough this time, I can’t blame the Coldfusion People!

So, I decided to do the Xampp thing. Xampp is a super easy installer for the lampp setup(I suppose its wampp for me as I’m talking about windows xp). Lampp is Linux, Apache, mySql, Php, and Perl. Probably the most common server software stack in the world.

Lets just get this out of the way : The Coldfusion part was pretty much flawless(as opposed to most other installs). No issues at all. The only real thing to complain about is the size of the installer and the amount of ram it takes to run this beast. The installer is a whopping 327mb. Then when it runs, it also takes up 300 megabytes. Sheesh! You can limit it in the administrator with the max heap size.

Then, installing xampp is a piece of cake as usual. This takes about 10 minutes. The installer is 33 megabytes. Considering that it installs 4 softwares in 1/10th the size of the coldfusion package. . . well, you can consider it yourself. Those packages also use up a small fraction of ram compared to cf as well.

But if you like cf which I do, then you like cf.

The next interesting items : Apache no longer stores everything in one huge conf file. It is now broken down into lots of includes and this is great. Its fairly easy to recognize and work with.

And your probably wondering when the hell I’m going to start talking about brain damage so here goes.

I deal a lot with name based hosts so I was setting up some virtualhosts. So, here is the first bitch. They give you a template that you can comment in to create a virtual host. This template has “…ErrorLog @rel_logfiledir@/dummy-hos…” and you’d be quick to assume that @rel_logfiledir is some parameter defined somewhere else. You’d probably just uncomment out and make some changes and restart apache. Well, apache won’t work out of the box like that. Yes, the template is F(**&^%^&%d.

You’ll get an error in your system event logs that looks like “The Apache2.2 service terminated with service-specific error 1 (0×1)”

Its an easy work around. You can just go back to “…ErrorLog logs/dummy-hos” (without the @ variable) and have it write to the logs directory in the apache folder.

Ok, so then I moved along and configured a virtual host. However, when trying to browse the content, all I could get was a 403 access not allowed error. Criminy.

This after much searching on Google is because the Apache 2.2 series adds some security. Documents are no longer viewable by all by default. You have to set a directory directive to get it to work like previous versions of Apache. Its best if you store all your virtualhosts in one folder. I store mine is a top level folder called sites. (Yes I’m very clever) So, your directory directive which I would place at or near the top of the /conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf file should look like this:

<Directory C:/Sites>
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
<Directory>

Then you’ll finally be able to browse your sites.

Also, the Xampp control panel no longer seems all that good at restarting Apache. I found that I had to go to the Services to get a reliable restart.

And then the final bitch. It used to be (in my experience) that you could just stop and start Apache whenever your conf files were incorrect. Well, for whatever reason, this is no longer the case. Whenever I got the “The Apache2.2 service terminated with service-specific error 1 (0×1)” error, I had to restart the computer to get Apache to try to start normally.

And that about describes my day.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 at 3:13 pm and is filed under Random Life Happenings, Coldfusion, Interesting Software, linux, Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.