all that's left of the fire department's test cars.

death by system administration - a true story.

Chris and I played around with Zope last night. He's building a new website for The Kudzu Wish and needs a CMS.

We installed Zope on my Windows XP box first, to quickly decide if Zope was the right tool for the job. It looked good, so then we installed it on dissonant so Chris could get to work.

Here's how our installs went:

Windows XP install

• 9:00p Download and run setup program.
• 9:06p Done. Zope is running as a service and works fine.

Linux install

• 10:30p Download Zope RPM.
• Our Python is 2.1.3 -- too old for the Zope RPM. We'll install the latest and greatest.
• No Python 2.3.3 RPM available for Redhat 7.2. (hey, it's a server, and it works.) Download source RPM to build an RPM.
• Can't build an RPM from source without the expat and db4 RPMs.
• Can't find a db4 RPM for 7.2. Finally find one on some unrecognizable website in a bare directory. Cross my fingers and install.
• Build the Python 2.3.3 source RPM.
• Uninstall Python 2.1.3, install 2.3.3.
• Try our wiki (which is python-based) to see if it works. It doesn't. There's no python2 executable anymore. There's a python2.3 executable. Softlink. Try wiki again. Wiki looks really broken. Whatever, not important. Move on.
• Install Zope RPM.
• Fire up Zope. A dozen errors puke from the startup script. Try to hit the admin page anyway. It looks like it's working but I can't log in.
• Decide that the error pukage is because Zope really wants Python 2.2.3, not "2.2.3 or newer".
• No Python 2.2.3 RPM avilalble for Redhat 7.2 either. Download source RPM and build an RPM.
• It's after midnight. Chris gives up and goes home.
• Uninstall Python 2.3.3.
• Realize that Python must be comfortable with multiple parallel installs. Reinstall 2.1.3 so the wiki works; softlink python2.1 to python2.
• Install Python 2.2.3. Observe that unlike the 2.3.3 RPM, this RPM nuked my python2 softlink and replaced python2 with a copy of the 2.2.3 binary. Redo softlink to 2.1.3 (so wiki will work).
• Uninstall Zope RPM and reinstall it to get a new admin user/password.
• Fire up Zope (no errors this time) and log in. Blank web browser. Can't get anything to come up.
• Walk around house for 5 minutes in tears.
• Decide to build Zope from source instead of using RPM. Download source.
• Run build script. Build script says "you have Python 2.2.3 installed which is okay but you know, we really prefer building against 2.3.3". Fight to control fist of rage.
• Reinstall Python 2.3.3 from the RPM I built.
• Run build script. Build won't run because a Makefile is missing from some Python directory. Google searches tell me that this is because I need to install the python-devel RPM. Install it.
• Build Zope.
• Run 'make install'.
• Start Zope with included script (install, of course, doesn't create /etc/rc.d/init.d stuff -- RPMs usually do that). It won't run. Permissions problems.
• Add 'zope' user by hand. Change permissions on all zope files.
• Start Zope. It works! Hallelujah!
• It works in the foreground. Start looking for a sample script to make it run as a daemon.
• It looks like -D is the "run as a daemon" switch.
• No, -D means Debug, which will cause it to freeze when running as a daemon.
• Find the nice zopectl script, which starts Zope as a daemon. Test it. It works. Softlink into /etc/rc.d/init.d.
• 2:15a Done. That was easy enough.

If I had to do it again, of course, I could do the Linux install much faster. But without the benefit of hindsight, all of those steps made sense. Even as the gray matter leaked out of my ears.

Don't get me wrong, it's absolutely amazing that software like Zope or Python exists for free. But we're not quite there yet, folks.