First thing to do was (since I had not done this before installing the “CG” stuff) was to backup the site directory (all 53 meg) and the database. BTW, restoring the old database (one month old) did not get me back to what that was. Somewhere, the module info stayed corrupted, so the restore database was not going to work. That means that some data was written to the site directory somewhere.

After several tries to install/add “CGExtensions” and “CGEcommerce”, I figured I’d try an upgrade to 1.8.2 from 1.8.1, rather than a full reinstall (which some had suggested). Got the 1.8.2 package, unzipped it and copied over all the files just as if an upgrade was going to happen.

That did not work, because the upgrade choked on “Module Missing” for the two culprits! Grrr!!!

Finally solved it, by installing the modules on another site and copying the modules to the offended directory, and then the upgrade worked.

OK, so probably should have tried the copy over trick before the upgrade, but nonetheless, that’s one less site that will have to be upgraded this week

3 pictures for this album

Got tired of all those individual “Cover Art” for every track. Knew there had to be a fix,so searched around. Seems that for some reason, when you import an album from CD, iTunes does not group the tracks, but puts them in very strange places. Not only that, each song has to have it’s own art. While it is true that you can select all the pieces in an album and do a  “multi-item” action and apply one art, you still end up with multiple album covers.

The Fix – select all the pieces in the album (click on the first item, and either ctrl-click each additional or shift-click). Then right-click and select “Get Info”, which will take you to the “Multiple Item Information” window. Simply check “Part of Compilation” and change the dropdown to “Yes”.

That’s it, and now you will have one piece of artwork for all the selections! Much nicer looking.

After trying to get everything fixed, I did a search for “mysql query cache” with Google, and ended up at a MySQL developers page where they explained everything in elegant form. The MySQL page even explained how you could enable cache for a sql statement, without having to shutdown MySQL. I followed the instructions, and now pages that used to take 20-50 seconds to load pop up in 3-5 seconds.

Now comes the fun – let’s see if any other pages load faster!

Yes! Other pages (that depend on MySQL) definitely load faster.

http://yourfamousdomain.com/index.php?page=new_products
The URL shows the question mark and all the code that has to follow, especially when you may have multiple layers or very long page names. That can be solved by turning on “mod_rewrite” in config.php in your CMSMS root directory. It also involves copying the htaccess.txt file from the CMS “doc” folder to the CMS root directory. Using “pretty URLs” will leave this in your browser location bar…
http://www.yourfamousdomain.com/new_products/

Let’s begin by opening “config.php” and making our changes. In the “URL Settings” section, find the following line
$config['url_rewriting'] = 'none';
and change “none” to “mod_rewrite”
Then where $config['page_extension'] = '/'; is, change the '' to '/'. This will add a forward slash at the end of your URL. Save and close your editor.

Now, copy /Doc/htaccess.txt to your root directory and rename the file “.htaccess” Note the DOT before htaccess. It has to be that way for Apache to find it. It is no longer htaccess.txt! In .htaccess, make sure that if you have installed CMS in a subdirectory, to find
RewriteBase /

and change the / to something like this:
RewriteBase /mycmsdirectory
Do not follow the directory name with a forward slash – leave it open!

Make sure that in your Apache “httpd-vhosts.conf” that the entry for your DocumentRoot looks like this:

<Directory "/users/myfabulousdomain/htdocs">
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride All
Order deny,allow
allow from all
Satisfy all
</Directory>

the “FollowSymLinks” is very important for “Pretty URLs”, as is “allow from all”

Example Lines From Template:

<h3>Commentary</h3>

{content block="sb_content_block" label="Sidebar Content Block"}
So, it is possible to have additional content blocks on any page, you just have to define them. The stylesheet CSS for “content” will still apply. In essence, you have created a “block” which is now saved in the database as whatever you happened to name it.

<code><link href=”*” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css”></code>

I was looking everywhere for what could be causing the error. Even tried moving html and php pages over from other sites that were not showing the error in the Apache error log. They seemed to work, so then the fact that it kept referring to “can’t map something to a file” got me started looking line by line for all file references.

My initial plan was to take the old motherboard from my desktop and use that, but the server software would not install – period! Even tried all the tweaks that the OS/2 User Group could come up with. That was going to be a 2.4Ghz machine with 1.5G of memory. Alas, that was not going to work.

Tried an older motherboard that we had used in my classroom, but just could not get that speed demon out of my mind. Finally, at the nudging of my OS/2 buddies, decided to run everything on a variant of OS/2 called “eComstation” or “eCS” on that fast motherboard. The software was sitting here, since I changed my desktop from eCS to Windows XP, so it wasn’t like having to buy some software. eCS has all the same services, except for the actual “server” software, but would run all the applications needed for the web and mail services.

Sure glad I decided to get some mind-melding from the OS/2 community, because I was on my way to a box that probably would have been slower than what it replaced.

After the install, updates and necessary testing, “warp2″ is on line serving web pages and sending and receiving emails. Hopefully the electricity bill will show an almost immediate drop.

Welcome to warp2!

Weasel by Peter Moylan works and works well in the OS/2 world, but after ‘xcopying’ everything from the old server to the new would not work. Changed the router to point all traffic to the new server, and incoming mail worked like a charm. The same could not be said for retrieving mail.

Got down to doing the telnet thing [telnet xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa 110] and attempting a login to see if there was any mail. It failed every time, and it did not matter what account or domain I was using.

Found It!

The answer is that you have to allow the local address(es) (after all, I was attempting to retrieve email from a local machine) that Weasel will talk to. Now that I have this resolved, time to let it run out of the rack for a day, then BAM! and shutdown the old energy hog.

The following message will appear:

You have re-installed MPTS. Locked files will not allow you to start MPTS.
You must exit MPTS, shutdown, and restart your workstation before you can start MPTS.

Chances are, that if you got the message, and have not re-installed MPTS, then what you have to do is rename or delete the file IBMLANLK.LST, found in the \OS2\INSTALL directory on the boot drive (I prefer the rename option, which would let me get back to the original condition). Once you have renamed the file, you will be able to start MPTS. DON’T delete this file if you have re-installed MPTS and haven’t gotten around to doing a shutdown and boot on the same boot drive.