Zend Optimizer again

Well, I happen to be back at my favorite application. Today I stumbled upon a “nice” thing. If you turn on the Zend Optimizer (doesn’t matter whether it is 2.6.2 or 3.3.0), one of the TYPO3 back ends ain’t showing *any* content in the preview pane. Once you turn the Zend Optimizer stuff off, it works without a problem.

O RLY ?
O RLY ?

And as Zend stated on their “Support Forum“, they don’t really support the Zend Optimizer stuff in the first place. Which is nice, what for do you need the Zend Guard shit in the first place ??

Well, so I do have two options now:

  1. Disable the one plug-in, which really needs the Zend Optimizer (as it also features the Zend De Guard engine – or whatever you want to call it)
  2. or risk some other things breaking due to the Zend Optimizer engine not working (correctly) with php-5.1.2 (which is rather old considering 5.3.0 is in development right now)

But I will see about that tomorrow …

YA RLY!
YA RLY!

SLES, ZendOptimizer and IBM PowerPC(4)+

What would you figure from the above ? Hopefully the rather obvious, that it’s a *really* shitty combination.

So we figured it would be a nice thing to test our new setup before going into pre-production testing or production, but we don’t have an extra spare box. So we took one of the power4 boxes we have mounted in the rack basically consuming energy all day (that’s about 38kWh a day) and installed SLES10 onto it. Which wasn’t all that bad (at first the box repeatedly started back to AIX, from CD and after convincing the SMS – that’s basically the bios on the power*-boxes also known as System Management Services with a hammer to boot from the first hard disk).

The real bad part started later. First the box committed suicide sometime on the weekend (the last one that is), which is rather not so good.

So we installed the ocfs2-tools (which is obviously needed if you want do writes on a SAN volume mounted on two separate boxes), configured the o2cb thing to start automatically on boot and added the entry to /etc/fstab.

So far so good, but as we slowly activated the apache-vhosts, we finally came to what cost me about three damned hours of my life:

Now guess what … ZendOptimizer just went bye-bye … Damn and what now ? So I looked at the Knowledgebase on zend.com, even found an Article stating it’d do that from time to time

And attached also the usual crap .. “Please update to the latest version”. Only problem with that is that the latest version is indeed available for x86_64 (meaning amd64 in Gentoo terms), but ain’t for ppc (even if the product page states it should be).

So I went home, knowing what the problem is – since it was already past 4pm – swearing a short “frack that“.

Now that I’m home, ate something (a rather good salad), listening to some Korn/Kid Rock/Offspring and after doing some undertakers work, I asked myself “Why exactly do we need that crappy application anyway ?” (beyond the obvious point, that the ZendOptimizer is like/ is a php-compiler cache).

It turns out, one of my co-workers wrote a TYPO3-plugin interfacing our local research database .. and the catchy thing is, guess what …

He “guarded” it with ZendGuard, thus we need to use the ZendOptimizer thingy; otherwise we couldn’t use it either … 😯

O RLY ?
O RLY ?