MyWeb & fun

It looks to me that the combination of:

Apache2
LibC update NWLIB6a
MOD_EDIR 1.0.8
Home directories on cluster nodes

Just plain isn't ready for prime time. The hard part is that the buggy system call seems to be nxcreatepathcontext in that it is very touchy about what it accepts as valid results. For reasons I've not been able to determine, I've been getting error values of 111 (Generic Filesystme error, see filesyserr) and 116 (Generic NCP error, see h_errno), both are not much with the useful. The really sad part is that I can't tell when these errors get thrown so myweb for students can go down for days before someone thinks to call in about it.

One of the more frustrating things is the mod_edir module itself. It is technically open-source. But since it compiles an NLM, I can't just 'pop in' and make edits to dump the values myself. Doing so requires a copy of Metrowerks Codeweaver with the Novell libraries, and that's a grand. Sorry. I've heard that there is a way to bugger GCC on Linux so it'll cross-compile, but I'm not THAT much of a geek to be able to pull that off and expect it to work. And it isn't helping that the two developers behind the product are not terribly responsive to problems like these.

What I need right now is either better error handling in mod_edir, better error handling in NXCreatePathContext, better error trapping in mod_edir, or the ability to tweak code myself.