Forum OpenACS Q&A: dbExperts Postgres for W32?

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1: dbExperts Postgres for W32?
Posted by John Sequeira on 05/02/02 04:48 PM
Anyone have experience with the dbExperts Pg distribution?

I'm wondering if anyone thinks this might be an easier way to get OpenACS going on Windows?

(FWIW I've tried twice to get the cygwin port going w/o luck.)

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2: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 05/02/02 04:57 PM
Holy Moly, John! If that thing works as advertised, it's an awesome find!

talli

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3: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by Kenny Chan on 05/02/02 06:31 PM
Hi John,

I haven't tried OpenACS / Aolserver for Win32 yet but I am playing with Cygwin / PostgreSQL these few days and having no problem with getting it run properly. I am using Cygwin v1.3.10-1 and PostgreSQL v7.2.1-1 that comes with it, the platform is Winblows 98se.

I had some problem at the beginning though, which was to get initdb going. The fix was to install cygipc to Cygwin and run it as suggested in the OpenACS on Windows document. After installing the ipc-daemon, both initdb and postmaster loading succeeded.

Btw, aren't dbExperts supposed to give people free download (or at least the source) for their PostgreSQL (according to the GPL)?

Sincerely,

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4: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 05/02/02 06:36 PM
Kenny, PG is licensed under the BSD, not the GPL. Red Hat also sells PG in a package without offering the downloads.

talli

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5: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by C. R. Oldham on 05/02/02 06:36 PM
Kenny,

Wow, kudos to you, I could *never* get AOLserver + Cygwin running reliably on 98.  I figured the threading model in 98 was just too fragile...

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6: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by Kenny Chan on 05/02/02 06:44 PM
Hey C.R.,

I still haven't tried the Aolserver Win32 part, I did get passed the PostgreSQL phase though...

I am going to try Aolserver Win32 / OpenACS next.

Sincerely,

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7: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by Kenny Chan on 05/02/02 06:46 PM
Talli,

Oh yea, Pg is BSD rather than GPL...

Oops :~)

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8: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by C. R. Oldham on 05/02/02 06:46 PM
Oh drat.  Kenny, I spent a whole day trying to get that to work, and just couldn't get past getting AOLserver to run.  Maybe it was my build, or whatever (I was using the build that I put in OpenACS new-file-storage), but it would segfault on me all the time...

In the end I had to tell the client he really needed to upgrade to Windows 2000 to be able to run an offline copy of his site on his PC.  We ended up switching to Apache. 😟

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9: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by Roberto Mello on 05/03/02 04:20 AM
Several times I've started to write a document describing installation of PG in Windows, but I'm surrounded by Unix boxes that have uptimes measured in years, so I never quite find time to mess with windows.

One guy in Brazil wrote a good guide for PG on Windows. I'll translate it to English. The same guy also wrote a little program that lets you start/stop PostgreSQL from the windows taskbar.

Regarding the dbExperts PostgreSQL distribution, it might be worth it just for the installer (if you don't want to wait for my translation).

I have to warn folks that they are using false advertising though, in that they say that their product is "natively compiled for windows" which is not true. Their product is PostgreSQL with cgywin, the only additions being the installer and a program to start/stop it from the taskbar.

I've gotten PG to work on Windows before, and it wasn't hard. What sort of problems were you having John? What version of Windows are you running? PG will always be flakey in Win98 (and 95, ME) because of inherent problems and deficiencies in the underlying operating system.

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10: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by Kenny Chan on 05/03/02 07:20 AM
Hi C.R.,

You mentioned switching to Apache... did you mean using mod_aolserver for your client's OpenACS based site? If so, which version of OpenACS is it? How well does OpenACS works with Apache / mod_aolserver on Win32 (Windows 9x, in particular) platform?

Thanks,

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11: Response to dbExperts Postgres for W32? (response to 1)
Posted by C. R. Oldham on 05/03/02 04:03 PM
<em>
You mentioned switching to Apache... did you mean using mod_aolserver for your client's OpenACS based site?</em>
<p>No, unfortunately.  My goal was to switch their 99% static site from Apache to AOLserver+OACS 4.5 so they could eventually take advantage of templating and the dynamic features.  We had all their content being served by AOLserver, but they got cold feet about the switch and so we went back to Apache.</p>