A Nightmare on Rails Street: Windows Lives!

John Johnson
2005-03-06T17:19:55Z

Just spent 40+ hours in two days deploying my app on Windows 2000. Not
all the time was Apache/MySql related, but a significant portion was.

What a nightmare that was. Unfortunately, the customer is dead-set on
"standardizing" by using Windows. So, as I sat there between a Linux
box and an AIX box working on this thing, I ran into problems, part of
which were:

CGI was slow (Dell PowerEdge 2500, P III 1.4GHz, 1G RAM, PERC Raid).

FastCGI refused to work. It complained and wanted me to see the
FastCgiIpcDir command, which I could never get to help the situation.

WebRick couldn''t be made into a service (you can with FireDaemon) to
start on boot.

When trying to write a monitor program (such as Mon that you can set up
with a few clicks of Webmin on a non-Windows box), I installed mysql.so
from somewhere so I could use ruby-mysql (or mysql-ruby) which I
couldn''t compile myself on this box. That broke one part of my program.
Five of six controllers worked fine, one would not.

Never got the Mailer to work (it isn''t a show stopper). Something about
the From header was broken. If it wasn''t that, there were relaying
complaints from Earthlink (try authenticating (no kidding!)) when
trying to use NetCat or email.

StatementInvalid errors (on things like ''SELECT * FROM users'')
when
using XAMPP. Had to downgrade to MySQL 4.0.23.

Ruby processes left all over the place when the above things were
dying. They couldn''t be ''End Process''ed or
''kill''ed from Cygwin. This
forced /long/ reboots on this server with it''s RAID array, etc.

Folders locked from the aforementioned zombie processes.

In despiration, tried Apache-1.x.x on Cygwin, slow as molasses.

I finally wound up with Apache-2.x.x, MySql-4.0.23-debug, don''t recall
if I got FastCgi to work or not, I have the httpd.conf somewhere in my
repository.

Rails apps don''t run well on IE 3 or whatever comes with Windows 95.
Not that they should.

Of course I created some problems of my own, such as the mysql.so one,
naming one of my directories incorrectly, etc. Now I''ll add Tests to
check for some of these things.

Things I Appreciate Even More
Working on my Mac.
My new favorite editor TextMate.
Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Apache, MySQL and all their contributors.
The test Redhat 7.3 server that was a breeze to setup in my garage.
The Fedora Core 3 server that was a breeze to setup in my garage.
The help I get from this list.
My Aeron chair.

Not sure of the reason for this post. Just wanted to vent a little.

Regards,
   JJ