Web Development and stuff…

While working on a small project today. I was confronted with a Zend_Db exception that i have seen before. But it still had me searching for a solution. So this time i will write it done for future reference.

I’m working on a small ZF project which uses the MVC structure. And in the Initializer the database connection is setup like this:

public function initDb()
    {
    	$pdoParams = array(
            PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_USE_BUFFERED_QUERY => true
        );

        $params = array(
            'host'     => 'localhost',
            'username' => '***********',
            'password' => '***********',
            'dbname'   => '***********',
            'driver_options' => $pdoParams,
        );

        $db = Zend_Db::factory('Pdo_Mysql', $params);
        Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::setDefaultAdapter($db);
        Zend_Registry::set('DB', $db);
    }

So when i first instantiated a connection to the database i was presented a nice error on screen. The stack trace is quiet long. But this is the most relevant part.

exception ‘Zend_Db_Adapter_Exception’ with message ‘SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2)’

The php bug tracker revealed a nice solution. For some strange reason the PDO extension can’t determine the correct socket while the mysql, mysqli extensions can. This is easily solved in the bootstrap of the project by adding an extra parameter to the config array passed when calling Zend_Db::factory();

$params = array(
            'host'     => 'localhost',
            'username' => '***********',
            'password' => '***********',
            'dbname'   => '***********',
            'driver_options' => $pdoParams,
            'unix_socket' => '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'
        );

        $db = Zend_Db::factory('Pdo_Mysql', $params);
        Zend_Db_Table_Abstract::setDefaultAdapter($db);
        Zend_Registry::set('DB', $db);

While installing a new mail server i ran into a problem with SMTP authentication. The mail server in question is postfix installed on a Debian lenny box. The backend for postfix is MySQL. And because SASL is always a pain to configure i used dovecot to do the SMTP authentication with the MySQL backend. This however resulted in the following error

Jun 21 17:43:02 ims1 dovecot: auth-worker(default): mysql: Connect failed to localhost (mail): Access denied for user ‘mail_admin’@'localhost’ (using password: YES) – waiting for 1 seconds before retry

It took me a while to figure this out. The settings in ‘dovecot-sql.conf’ were correct. Logging in with the same data from a shell went without a problem. I remembered i had this problem some years ago. With a vpopmail setup. The problem then was the encryption algorithm used by MySQL. So i tried to use the older encryption algorithm.

SET PASSWORD FOR ‘user’@'localhost’ = OLD_PASSWORD(‘password’);

After a restart everything was fine.

Jun 21 18:41:03 ims1 dovecot: auth-worker(default): mysql: Connected to localhost (mail)

Like i said it took me a while to figure out. So maybe i can safe somebody some time.

Today on planet-php.net there are some posts [1] [2] about Andrii Nikitin a MySQL support engineer based in Ukraine. Andrii’s (2,5 year old) son Ivan is in need of a bone marrow transplant. The cost for this operation is somewhere bewteen $150.000 and $250.000. Which is a lot of money. So he asked the MySQL community for help. Although i don’t know the guy. I do use MySQL regularly. And i feel for him and his family. So decided to add a donation. I’m in no way rich and just bought a new house. But i think every body should pitch in and help out this guy. And offer his son a fair chance at life.

Paypal:
http://tinyurl.com/6rxjsz
Or
by check payable to:

MySQL, Inc.
Mail to: MySQL, Inc.
Attn: Linda Dong
20450 Stevens Creek Blvd #350
Cupertino, CA 95014

or
US wire transfer:

MySQL Inc: 7396643001
SWIFT: NDEAUS3N

or
International wire transfer in any currency:
Bank: Nordea Bank
Bank address: Stockholm, Sweden
Bank account: 3259 17 03868
IBAN: SE27 3000 0000 0325 9170 3868
SWIFT: NDEASESS

Normally i have no problems installing PHP. So when i decided to upgrade 5.2.5 to 5.2.6 on my windows dev box. I was surprised to see that php_mysql.dll and php_pgsql.dll were not loading after a clean install. No matter what i tried. I kept getting the “PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library” error.

Some years ago this problem was obvious. The problem was always solved by copying the libmysql.dll to windows/system32. But this changed. For the last year i never had to copy this file. So i couldn’t really believe this was the problem. But after trying for some hours. I gave up. Copied the libmysql.dll file to windows/system32. And voila…. the mysql extension now loads. But i still have no solution for the pgsql extension. Which i really need by the way. WTF happened here? How is it possible that two of the most used extensions do not load after a clean install?

UPDATE*

The postgres problem is solvable by installing the postgres server. And adding the PostgreSQL\8.3\bin to the PATH variable. Weird stuff…