Linux Admin Zone

Recenlty I was in need to update a old subversion server to latest one in a CentOS 5.2 box. I removed the older rpms and compiled subversion from latest source. Everything seems fine except ViewVC which is used to browse svn repositories.

Following error was occuring:

An Exception Has Occurred
Python Traceback

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/local/viewvc-1.1/lib/viewvc.py”, line 4065, in main
request.run_viewvc()
File “/usr/local/viewvc-1.1/lib/viewvc.py”, line 403, in run_viewvc
self.view_func(self)
File “/usr/local/viewvc-1.1/lib/viewvc.py”, line 1662, in view_roots
allroots = list_roots(request)
File “/usr/local/viewvc-1.1/lib/viewvc.py”, line 3922, in list_roots
cfg.utilities, cfg.options.svn_config_dir)
File “/usr/local/viewvc-1.1/lib/vclib/svn/__init__.py”, line 53, in SubversionRepository
import svn_repos
File “/usr/local/viewvc-1.1/lib/vclib/svn/svn_repos.py”, line 25, in ?
from svn import fs, repos, core, client, delta
ImportError: No module named svn

When running subversion with apache, how good config you’d done, you may still found that your svn repos are not accessible through http:// or https:// and most probably you’ll find this error in your apache error logs:

child pid 6485 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)

In my CentOS 5.2 box with httpd 2.2.3 and subversion 1.6.1, this error caused enough headache for me and claimed long time before I was able to find out the root cause. The problem is caused by collision of apr and apu utilities which are installed by both subversion and Apache. These packages are required to access svn via apache. The subversion-deps package contains apr and apr-util version 0.9.x, but apache 2.2.x uses apr and apr-util 1.2.x, and subversion and apache must be using the same version of apr and apr-util, else things can result in above error.

Generating PDF or postscript files on the fly with php is quite easy using a library called html2ps/pdf. Following are the steps which I took to install it on a fedora 7 server running php 5.x

As per the documentation, html2ps/pdf requires either Ghostscript or PDFLIB libraries for fast pdf generation. You can also use the inbuilt FPdf routines but that’s much slower. PDFLIB is non-free library which may requires you to have a license to use, therefore, I opted for GhostScript here.

Step 1. Check whether ghostscript is already installed or not:

After a try to install perl Geo::IP through cpan, and spending some moments to resovle error about missing C api library etc. I’ve opted for manual install which goes quite smooth.

Here are the steps which I followed on my CentOS 5.2 server. Please note that the version of software mentioned here might be outdated at the point of your reading, therefore, you should visit the relevant site and fetch latest one.

Step 1. Download, compile and install maxmind’s C API:

# cd /usr/src
# wget http://www.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/c/GeoIP-1.4.3.tar.gz
# tar xzf GeoIP-1.4.3.tar.gz
# cd GeoIP-1.4.3
# ./configure; make; make install