Installing mdid3 on Redhat Enterprise Linux 5.ish

Getting started

Get your repos in order

Redhat Enterprise 5 is about stability, which is great - except almost nothing used by MDID was in the "stability" camp when RHEL 5 was solidified. A basic RHEL 5 server setup will be working against ease of installation the whole way through, but it ends up not being as bad as all that. The main point of pain is that most of the packages needed for MDID3 are either a) not available in the official red hat repos, b) are the wrong ones, or c) they are not named exactly the same as in the Debian family (which includes Ubuntu).

So

Assuming EPEL is not configured, enable it (slightly deeper tutorial)

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

Because rhel5 ships with python 2.4 (!!) and yum will break if you upgrade python to 2.6 (!#$%!@#!) it is advisable to install python26 to power django. The EPEL repo above contains python26, but not all of the other packages required for mdid3, so I used Chris Lea's repo as well:

rpm -Uvh http://yum.chrislea.com/centos/5/i386/chl-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-CHL

Then grab git-core

sudo yum install git-core

Setup the install

YUM YUM!

I was unable to find two packages that are part of the Windows 2008 & Ubuntu instructions, but the setup I was doing (all RHEL 5, LAMPy) seems to get by without them:

tdsodbc ( I think it's all handled by pyodbc/freetds/unixODBC )

libmysqlclient16-dev ( I suspect this functionality is in MySQL-python26 )

RHEL is different from linux distros like Ubuntu because it is designed for stability over the newest features. For this reason, many python packages that would normally be installed via easy_install or pip need to be installed via YUM

Here are the packages that need to be installed in order (TODO: this list is from my notes and needs to be tested still)

sudo yum install python26 -y 2> errors/python26.txt
sudo yum install python26-devel -y  2> errors/python26-devel.txt
sudo yum install python26-setuptools -y 2> errors/python26-setuptools.txt
sudo yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk  -y 2> errors/java-1.6.0-openjdk.txt
sudo yum install libjpeg-devel -y 2> errors/libjpeg-devel.txt
sudo yum install unixODBC -y 2> errors/unixODBC.txt
sudo yum install unixODBC-devel -y 2> errors/unixODBC-devel.txt
sudo yum install freetds-devel -y  2> errors/freetds-devel.txt
sudo yum install MySQL-python26 -y 2> errors/MySQL-python26.txt
sudo yum install python-ldap -y 2> errors/python-ldap.txt
sudo yum install memcached -y 2> errors/memcached
sudo yum install python-memcached -y 2> errors/python-memcached.txt
sudo yum install mod_wsgi -y 2> errors/mod_wsgi.txt
sudo yum install gcc-c++  -y 2> errors/gcc.txt
sudo yum install pyodbc -y 2> errors/pyodbc.txt

Alternatively, you can do them all at once:

sudo yum install python26 python26-devel python26-setuptools java-1.6.0-openjdk \ 
libjpeg-devel unixODBC unixODBC-devel freetds-devel  MySQL-python26 python-ldap \   
python-memcached mod_wsgi gcc-c++ pyodbc

If you're installing sql on the same server

sudo yum install mysql-server -y

(interlude) Configure easy_install for use with Python26

**Note: some of the problems this section describes can also be circumvented by [using a virtual environment](virtualenv%3A--for-the-better)**

As of this writing, if you install python26 from the Chris Lea repo, the command line easy_install will execute easy_install for Python 2.4 instead of 2.6, which is useless because Python 2.6 can't see libraries installed for 2.4 unless you muck about with links, and I don't think that's the greatest idea, unless you're more comfortable with centos/unix/multiple python installs than I am, in which case I don't know if you are reading this anyway.

After installing python26-setuptools (see above), you can execute easy_install for python26 like this:

sudo python26 /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/easy_install.py [package-name]

which is unwieldy, so I made an alias in my bash_profile:

cd ~
nano .bash_profile

and then added this line above the section that declares the PATH:

alias easy26='sudo python26 /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/easy_install.py'

Then

do the easy26

easy26 python-ldap 
easy26 pil 
easy26 python-dateutil 
easy26 flickrapi 
easy26 werkzeug 
easy26 reportlab

or

easy26 python-ldap mysql-python pil python-dateutil flickrapi werkzeug reportlab

(optional) Set up some aliases for command line ease

alias rooi='cd /var/local/mdid/rooibos/rooibos/' alias rooilog='cd /var/local/mdid-storage/mdid-scratch/logs'

Configure and start apache

sudo nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

and then start it

sudo /sbin/service httpd start

Configure ssl

Generate an ssl key & request

These are the commands that worked for me - the example commands given on the GlobalSign Apache/SSL page did not work for me. You may need to change these based on your specific IT environment (for whatever reason, -out as an arg did not work, but > did /shrug) - and for a testing environment you could just generate your own certificate.

Note: change "mdid.university.edu" to the fully qualified domain name of your mdid server

sudo mkdir /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.csr /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.crt 

sudo openssl genrsa 2048 > mdid.university.edu.key
sudo openssl req -new -key /etc/httpd/conf/ssl.key/mdid.university.edu.key -out \   
/etc/httpd/conf/ssl.csr/mdid.university.edu.csr

Submit the CSR to your CA with your certificate request

Notes, troubles, etc.

Redhat & Apache

http://redhat.activeventure.com/71/referenceguide/s1-configuration-config.html

Redhat socket errors

You need to set a non-locked down area for wsgi sockets (the default causes errors like this:

(13)Permission denied: mod_wsgi (pid=26962): Unable to connect to WSGI \
daemon process '<process-name>' on '/etc/httpd/logs/wsgi.26957.0.1.sock' \
after multiple attempts.

lock it down with this apache server directive: