“I can't see the forest! There's too many trees in the way!”

See Sean.

See Sean mad.

See Sean hit desk with head.

Bam.

Bam.

Bam.

See Sean fall over unconscious. Can you say “unconscious?” I knew you could.

Silliness aside, I just spent the past five hours trying to solve what ended up being a non-issue, and right now, being unconscious sounds appealling.

I was trying to install our second PostgreSQL [1] version of “Project: Leaflet [2]” and was not having an easy time of it. The MySQL [3] version? Trivial, if only because every Linux distribution pretty much supports the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl;PHP;Python) stack and it Just Works™; not so much the LAPP (Linux, Apache, PostgreSQL, Perl;PHP;Python) stack.

In fact, our setup is rather custom in nature and was missing a key ingredient—PHP support for PostgreSQL. Only after that was installed did the five hour non-problem start. When installing “Project: Leaflet” (by running install.php) Smirk, P and I kept getting the following error:

Error in query: CREATE TABLE leaflet_ban ( id serial not null, address varchar(50) NOT NULL default ”, note varchar(75) NOT NULL default ”, status smallint NOT NULL default '1', PRIMARY KEY (id, address) ); Table 'mmpro_ban' already exists (Error #: 1050)

Further compounding the issue—when I reinstalled over our working PostgreSQL version, it worked. Let's see—it works under PostgreSQL 8.2.4, but fails under PostgreSQL 8.2.9. That was the only difference (as it turned out) between the two systems. Apache and PHP were the same.

Only with Wlofie's [4] help (or rather, he sat there as I ranted, and then asked a few pointed questions) did I realize what the problem was all along—when I installed the PHP/PostreSQL module, I forgot to restart the webserver.

D'oh!

[1] http://www.postgresql.org/

[2] /boston/2008/08/07.1

[3] http://www.mysql.com/

[4] http://wlofie.dyndns.org/

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