IBM AIX 5.3, Prepare to be my bitch

I’m having fun adapting to the system here, at it’s core theres an IBM AIX 5.3 box that does most of the hard stuff, but then there is this horrible windows monster network attached to it, along with a dedicated machine for MS-SQL and a few other machines for fileservers and Exchange, the system is clunky and at best in-efficient. The off-shore support for the software we use is ridiculous (it took an entire week for them to login and make me a new sysop user) I’m sorry but that’s just sad, and totally unacceptable in any industry let alone the BANKING industry, the sad part is that there is really no other choice but to use them or develop your own software, and the bank I am at is not big enough to handle that kind of project on its own… so there we are between a rock and a hard place.

PostGreSQL.org

I’ve taken on a contract recently that meant I needed to install a PostGreSQL  database on a windows server, so I figured I’d brush up on it a little before I began the real job. I installed Windows Server 2003 Standard in a virtual machine in my net-book using virtualbox and downloaded the latest pre-built binary of PostGres for Windows which meant I had a portable copy of my little testing chamber to take with me on-site for reference if needed.

I’d never installed PostGreSQL on a windows system before so I expected some teething issues to play with, but I was very wrong. It was dead easy.

Installing the actual database wasn’t the main thing that impressed me though, the main thing that impressed me about installing PostGreSQL on a windows server was an application called “Stack Builder” which makes installing a database server and web server (ApachePHP with phppgadmin and a few other programs) on windows as easy as it is in Debian, easier than debian if you are the kind of person who shrieks in fear of a Linux bash console (like some managers I could name)

On completion of the install of the database I was surprised by a nice looking GUI that gave me options for it to download, install and configure several applications and a few web apps (like drupal and media wiki) so they were setup and ready to roll with my new database, being a person all for trying new things, I went ahead and ticked what I wanted, ApachePHP, phppgadmin and the postgres ODBC driver, then clicked next.

It then downloaded everything it needed, presented me with a port option for Apache (I’m glad it did that as it takes out another step out of messing around with configs to get it to run on the same machine as IIS if you already had that running on the standard web server port, it’s default offering was 8080 which I left as is ) It then asked me for database information for phppgadmin which I left at its default settings for server and port as I had not modified that from the database install and clicked next. PostgresqlODBC was next and that was as easy as clicking next then finish.

After that it let me know that it was all done and I should really reboot my server now, so  I did.

Upon reboot everything was in convenient start-menu locations, even phppgadmin had a link.

The default web-root of “C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\EnterpriseDB-ApachePhp\apache\www” was a little buried but easily fixed and IS customizable in the install script if you change the install directory.

Thank you VERY much PostGreSQL & Stack Builder, everything ran perfectly!