What do you do when confronted with a technical problem that simply can’t be true? If someone came to you and told you they couldn’t send email outside a 500 mile radius
This one should bring a smile to face of any technical administrator. The joys of technology.
As is always the case with RedHat and CentOS, a number of packages in the usual yum repositories lack heavily behind the advancements made by their authors and teams. One such package is ImageMagick, which as of writing is back at 6.2.8 as opposed to 6.4.8.
This for the most part isn’t an issue unless there is a specific upgrade, bug fix or enhancement you are looking to implement from within the ImageMagick library. In my case it was the use of the caret(^) character for specifying minimum geometric resize values.
Unfortunately none of the yum repositories we regularly use have an updated package for 6.3.x or 6.4.x which left us in a bit of bind. We could either code our way around the issue (expensive, frustrating and time consuming) or seek another upgrade path.
As no stranger to compiling packages from source I grabbed the latest tar.gz from the ImageMagick download page and proceeded to decompress it and compile. I then removed the yum installed package. Unfortunately at the end of this process, whilst the installation had succeeded I received strange error messages from the convert command line utility:
convert: no decode delegate for this image format `Book_icon.png' @ magick/constitute.c/ReadImage/526.
convert: missing an image filename `image.jpg' @ wand/convert.c/ConvertImageCommand/2710.
It turns out this is an easy enough problem to diagnose and resolve. The use of the following command provides an overview of the formats currently supported by our ImageMagick installation.
identify -list format
Well damn, no jpg support, no png, infact lots of things are missing. I guess we are missing some other rather important libraries prior to compilation. After installing the appropriate devel libraries via yum, we can configure again, make clean and install. Phew, thank god it works this time.
yum remove ImageMagick
yum install tcl-devel libpng-devel libjpeg-devel ghostscript-devel bzip2-devel freetype-devel libtiff-devel
wget url to ImageMagick download
tar zxvf ImageMagick-6.4.8-3.tar.gz
configure --prefix=/usr/local --with-bzlib=yes --with-fontconfig=yes --with-freetype=yes --with-gslib=yes --with-gvc=yes --with-jpeg=yes --with-jp2=yes --with-png=yes --with-tiff=yes
make clean
make
make install
Too easy. Unfortunately you won’t get updates to your ImageMagick pushed from yum anymore, so keep the additional administration costs in mind, but for those requiring the latest versions this is the quick way to get setup and running.
I have recently undertaken the management of a number of Plesk 8 based hosting machines and came across an interesting problem today when working with backups. On this machine I have several eZ Publish installations, one of which I was looking to copy to a local drive for testing purposes. FTP just seemed like a waste of time… perhaps I was wrong.
I logged into the administration panel of Plesk to find that the backup utilities were not installed by default, thankfully Plesk makes that operation rather easy, but I am still at a loss as to which genius thought backup wouldn’t be an important enough feature to install. Granted most serious hosts are using 3rd party backup solutions like R1Soft, but still…
Having resolved that issue I proceeded to backup the domain in question and download the resulting file… which was hidden away in the middle of nowhere inside a filesystem that looks more like a rabbit warren than an organised, enterprise hosting platform. Upon downloading the file I reached the next problem… what to do with it..?
It seems that Plesk/SWSoft/Parallels have decided tar.gz is too mainstream for their product, so they opted for something more exciting, something without an extension. I haven’t had a time to even investigate what this crazy system does, but suffice to say if you have StuffIt Expander you are in luck. Drag the file onto StuffIt and it decompresses it into what OS X believes to be a number of executable files. Drag the required files onto StuffIt to expand those into the files you require.
Is it just me, or does this seem stupid? Maybe Plesk got it right and they just forgot to inform us about this whiz bang thing they developed… anyone have any thoughts on this?