Monday, February 28, 2005

Windows MSI installer won't install

I was trying to install Veritas Backupexec 9.1 tonight, and it kept failing with "backupexec failed to install msde". The Veritas site said to try to install manually, and I found that I couldn't execute the MSI file at all. It simply did nothing when I clicked the file, but that was a problem I had seen before. Security settings on MSI files have to be very leniant for some reason, so I simply granted "everyone" full access to the install files. I'm not sure which user actually needs access in order for the install to run properly (maybe SYSTEM?), but since security isn't going to be important on files I'm deleting, I just granted EVERYONE full access to the entire folder. You should not, however, make a habit of doing this on files you don't want your entire organization to have access to.

Bottom Line:
clicking an MSI file seems to do absolutely nothing? Try granting full access permissions to the windows group "EVERYONE" and see if things change. If security is important on the MSI file, take away the full access as soon as you are finished installing.

Wednesday, February 02, 2005

PHP Sessions stop working after mod_php4 upgrade to php 4.3.10

Last night I upgraded PHP to php 4.3.10 from 4.3.9. Everything seemed to have gone well, but today people complained about some scripts not working. I did some digging and found that session_start() would stop the script cold with no error messages. I was rather confused for a while, then decided to just recompile the session extension ( /usr/ports/www/php4-session/make && make install ) and things seemed to work after that. Now I'm going to recompile all extensions in case something else was broken in the process. Hopefully I won't be breaking anything myself.