Bugzilla, CPAN, CentOS, VMWare, VPSLAND

I've been fighting with VMWare, CPAN and CentOS this week.

Okay, really only fighting with VPSLAND, who say they've fixed my account and allow me to re-order. Wrongo. Account not fixed. Ability to order (even with a new account) not possible. So I guess I have to look for another hosting provider.


What I've been doing in the mean time is setting up a VMWare server instance of CentoOS 5. My first goal is getting a development version of Bugzilla running so I can start on writing some tests and dig into improving the Bugzilla Webservice module. That was three days ago.

To be fair, I've been sick, and yesterday I mostly played Tower Defense, a cool flash strategy game. Possibly my new favorite after Dicewars.

VMWare has been flaky with network connections, making it difficult to download dependencies. Part of the problem is my piece of junk Gateway MT3423 laptop, combined with Windows Vista Ultimate, which has made losing wifi a frequent occurence. The other part is with either VMWare or Vista, or the two in cohoots, dropping the connection. It seems VMWare is unable to establish a connection after Windows loses it and regains it. Not without a hard boot at least. I plugged into the router today to fix that, and have been merrily downloading, building, and testing all day.

That's right. It took all day to resolve the dependencies, using CPAN, Yum, RPMFind, and building from scratch when necessary. This is not a process I look forward to with client sites. I still don't have mod_php or java set up.

I wanted to have hand compiled perl,php,apache, apache modules, perl modules, etc. that I could copy from my CentOS VM to a production site, but that's not happening yet. I'm itching to do some development.

CPAN truly is a fragile monstrosity that makes DLL hell look like Nirvana and RPM hell like Moksha. It's the number one reason not to use Perl. But unfortunately, also the number noe reason to use Perl.

I have a working Bugzilla on Windows, using PPMs, but 001compile.t fails on install_module.pl and CPAN.pm. I talked to someone on #mozwebtools about it, but didn't get any info. I wouldn't want to support a Windows/ActivePerl install either. It looks to me like it's just coded to use 'cpan install', and not 'ppm install.' I could have got by, but want to have as clean a test environment as possible for when I ask questions.

Once I got all the bugzilla perl dependencies installed (XML::Parser has circular dependencies that can't be resolved vi CPAN, Chart::Base apparently wasn't on any of the mirrors, and GD just plain doesn't work), then I ran into what I thought was a breaker. It looked like VMWare was up to no good with the network interface, but I guessed, and discovered that CentOS has restrictive firewall rules that prevent anything but localhost from accessing all but port 22 (SSH) and ping requests. I just turned IPTables off for now, and then, after some messing with httpd.conf, I finally got bugzilla working.

Email is next. I can send email from the command line now, but bugzilla didn't send an admin email.