Flashes of Panic

• Installation of SpamAssassin 3.0.3 fails at the “make test” stage. All test pass except for “SA_test” which seems to be important.

t/spam......................FAILED tests 1-7
        Failed 7/7 tests, 0.00% okay

• Is there such thing as an open-source license management solution? It seems counter-intuitive somehow, but a customer asked this morning. I thought (since they were working on an Xserve) that it should be possible to write a shell-script wrapper to check, create, and/or remove lockfiles as a sort of base-level concurrent-user limitation. Maybe the idea that it’s that simple is enough to keep anyone from making an open-source KeyServer?

• I need to make PHP on a Linux server connect to an MS-SQL server which is Elsewhere, both in network and geographic terms. No problem recompiling PHP with the mssql functions and FreeTDS, but now it is both (a) failing to connect, and (b) producing no error messages. I think this is the difference between “failing gracefully” and “failing obstinately.” I have no other MS-SQL server to test with, so I can’t tell if the problem is with my server or theirs.

Update: And then the SpamAssassin build failed on another, different set of tests. And then it crashed the server. Maybe again some other day?

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