Back again and have a few things to share

I have not been posting for a while because while installing the LAMP Server we came acros a very confusing error which had us all stumped. A very big thank you to the Zend support team for pointing us in the right direction and spending hours trying to find out what was going on! For FREE support its the BEST support I have come across for any product, others could learn a lot from their untiring dedication to the user community. Anyhow enough of the praise for Zend, we do have a couple of things we would like to see fixed up which we will mention later.

So the problem, we had installed everything and were starting to do the VirtualHosting configuration (we will get that finished and posted next week) when we came across a problem. Everytime we tried to get a php script served it wouldnt serve it properly, the html content was being served but not the php content.

We went through the configs a dozen or so times, uninstalled and re-installed the product about 4 times and generally lost a lot of hair. Eventually we logged the problem with Zend (we wanted to make sure we had all our information right) and they duly started to collect the information required, we shipped all of the configs, script content, phpinfo output and everything else we thought would help solve the issue. We still worked on the problem, setting up multiple test environments with nothing we tried resolving the issue. Eventually we hooked up with Rod from Zend who signed into the system with us and looked at what was happenning. After about an hour we started to look at the output and noticed the source was spaced with an extra character between every letter. We then looked at the CCSID for the jobs and the documents and noticed the jobs were running at CCSID 65535 so we changed them to 37 with no effect. We also looked at the CCSIDs of the files we tested with and they were at CCSID 1252. We both felt this was a problem, so we agreed to set the System Values to US based values and re-ipl the system.

We did this but had no luck everything was still the same. I did however try the same pages through Firefox and noticed something very strange, it showed a symbol between each and every character (IE just showed the text in the browser we only noticed the spacing when we viewed the source in note pad or whatever it uses). This looked like we were heading in the right direction, I sent off a copy of the output to Zend and set about removing and installing zendcore again!

Then this morning we set up the environment (the re-install deletes the config so we had to copy it back in) and still the same result. We then looked at the User profiles (we had seen issues where IBM ships profiles *disabled) but they were fine, we then looked at the php files again and noticed the files which worked were in the ‘/www/zendcore/htdocs’ directory, so we looked at the CCSID of those files (CCSID 1252), we then looked at the files in the test server directory (CCSID 13488 which is a special UNICODE character set implemented by IBM?). We had been moving the files around and just copying them, so every file was CCSID 13488! We created a new file with CCSID 1252 in the test directory and now everything is working!

So here are the lessons we learnt from this.

Firstly Zend has great support! Next ensure you set up the system values before moving ahead and install software, it could save headaches later. Also IE is a corrupt browser which hides issues and doesnt show true html output. Use Firefox as a suitable test of proper formated html! We did try Opera which has other problems and Safari which both gave differing results and didnt really help. Dont remove the Zend software unless you really have to and if you do make sure you go in and clean up the residue files (rm -R in the QP2TERM session works fine for this)

Couple of things we would like to see improved.

Firstly Zend needs to improve the interfaces to the configs and setup menu’s. The Re-start option on the ZCAMENU is flaky at best. The DLTLICPGM exit program needs serious attention, why does it copy everything into a renamed Directory and Library? The DLTLICPGM on the ZendPlatform should not end the apache server and not restart it without warning about this fact, I was running production apps which ended abnormally because I removed the platform option. We have spent a lot of time on the LPP exit programs and creating LPP’s so we could help there!

I was told by Zend (Rod) that there is a PTF SI28790 shipped by IBM which allows the PASE Apache server to be controlled in the IBM ILE interface? This has to be the right way to go, using the work arounds we did to manipulate the environment isnt right!

Now we will get back to building the rest of the LAMP Server and post the results.

Chris…