[rt-users] RT attachment corruption on RedHat 9

[Mark D. Nagel]

Graeme Pyle wrote:

> I've been reading your postings from a few weeks back relating to
> attachment corruption on RedHat 9.
>
> Have you managed to nail-down the problem yet? I'm having exactly the
> same problems you're experiencing, and also only on RH9 - my Gentoo
> box is fine. LANG=C doesn't completely fix the problem.
>
> Seems like I should bite the bullet and nuke the RH9 box...

Same feeling here -- what I finally ended up doing was to build an
OpenPKG instance with only the exact items I needed to run Apache 1.3,
mod_perl, MySQL, etc.  OpenPKG is available at www.openpkg.org.  Doing
this effectively keeps the various bad things in RH 9 separated from my
RT requirements -- I really only care that the kernel and supporting
processes are running correctly (we hope that is true at least).  Sad
thing is we originally upgraded to RH 9 to ensure we had perl 5.8
available; had I considered the OpenPKG route before, we could have kept
things at the much more stable RH 7.3.

The actual installed package list in that instance is:

apache-1.3.28-1.3.1
binutils-2.14-1.3.0
bzip2-1.0.2-1.3.0
db-4.1.25.1-1.3.0
expat-1.95.6-1.3.0
freetype-2.1.4-1.3.0
gcc-3.3-1.3.0
gd-2.0.15-1.3.0
jpeg-6b-1.3.0
lzo-1.08-1.3.0
m4-1.4o-1.3.0
mm-1.3.0-1.3.0
mysql-4.0.14-1.3.2
openpkg-1.3.1-1.3.1
openpkg-tool-1.3.0-1.3.0
openssl-0.9.7b-1.3.2
perl-5.8.0-1.3.2
perl-comp-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-conv-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-crypto-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-db-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-dbi-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-dbix-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-ds-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-gd-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-gfx-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-mail-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-net-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-openpkg-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-parse-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-ssl-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-sys-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-term-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-text-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-time-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-util-1.3.0-1.3.0
perl-www-1.3.2-1.3.2
perl-xml-1.3.0-1.3.0
png-1.2.5-1.3.0
readline-4.3-1.3.0
zlib-1.1.4-1.3.0

Then, I used CPAN to add/update the modules needed to bring the instance
to RT compliance, then upgraded RT to use this instance of Perl and
transferred the database.  Nary a hiccup since, but it's only been a few
days.  This is more or less following the advice of "build your own
isolated environment" that others have voiced.  I just chose to use
OpenPKG to do this since it is much easier to maintain than manual
compilation of the necessary components.  One word of warning -- OpenPKG
statically links everything -- the virtual memory for Apache tends to be
in the 130MB range, so make sure you have plenty of RAM and swap.

Hope this helps someone -- it's definitely helped me!

Regards,
Mark

-- 
Mark D. Nagel, CCIE #3177 <mnagel at willingminds.com>
Principal Consultant, Willing Minds LLC
tel/fax: 949-623-9853, web: http://www.willingminds.com/