Going Insane with Movable Type

I understand this isn't officially supported but I've heard of several DreamHost customers installing MT with no problems.

I have been searching and trying things for a very long time, I just can't seem to get this to work. I'm a pretty technical person so it's somewhat embarrassing as well, heh.

mt-check comes up great, for the record.

When I run mt-load I get an error about my "./db" directory. However, I have this line commented out! As if it's not even reading the mt.cfg file.

My config is set up as follows:

# DataSource ./db

ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
Database correctdb
DBUser correctuser
DBHost db.correctdomain.com

I've tried completely deleting the DataSource line, putting the ObjectDriver lines above it, etc. etc. etc.

I can't even get an SQL error, I only get this default ./db error.

I decided to try adding the db directory with the correct permissions just to see, and the install went completely through installing a flat-file DB with no problems.

So can anyone help me? I would greatly appreciate it. I'm about to give up but I can't help but think it's something simple that I'm missing since I can't seem to find any on-going posts about this problem and Google turns up nothing.

Thanks and best regards.

Did you try doing the install using my instructions for installing MT on a DreamHost server?

By the way, in my mt.cfg file, the DataSource line is NOT commented out. It appears in mt.cfg after the other four lines.

You might also want to try the following steps to make sure you have the database config right. Replace the bits in bold below with exactly what you have in your mt.cfg file.

1) In a browser, load the URL db.correctdomain.com.
2) When you get the login prompt for PHPMyAdmin, enter correctuser and the password.
3) If this all works fine, make sure the database correctdb appears at the top of the list to the left.

Robert
http://www.wombatnation.com/

Thanks for the quick reply Robert. I appreciate it.

I did try your MT install directions at one point just in case I missed anything. I still had the same problem.

I decompressed the tarball on the server so I don't think it's a binary issue.

Interesting that your DataSource line isn't comment out. Commenting and uncommenting mine seemed to make no difference at all.

I'm going to rm -rf everything and try again. I'm not ready to give up yet!

OK, I have still been messing with this.

It seems no matter what I change the "./db" to, it still errors with "./db"

For example, I changed my config file to:

# DataSource ./data

ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
Database correctdb
DBUser correctuser
DBHost db.correctdomain.com

And I still get this error:

Bad ObjectDriver config: Your DataSource directory ('./db') does not exist.

This tells me that mt-load.cgi isn't even reading the mt.cfg correctly. However, if I delete mt.cfg then mt-load reports the missing file, so it is getting the correct file.

Looking at the code in mt-load.cgi, you can see the IF statement for the DBI::mysql ObjectDriver but I can't seem to find any references to the DataSource.

This seems very odd.

Does 3.1 secretly require a purchase of the license or support, then you get the real mt-load.cgi? Haha.. I just can't figure anything else out.

GOT IT!

OK, here was my problem for future users...

Even though I untared everything on the server, I used Dreamweaver to download, edit, and upload the mt.cfg file.

Apparently even though I have *.cfg set as a valid file-type in Dreamweaver, when I would upload it back none of the linebreaks would hold. Therefore all the text would run together.

So even though it was ASCII obviously it would not work. This made MT default to looking for "./db" rather than giving an error more suited toward an error reading the mt.cfg for some reason.

So anyway, thank you very much for your quick responses and help during my little crisis. I'm glad to be a part of the DreamHost community. I was refered here by my second half, wendy, who has been a satisfied DreamHost customer since 1998.

Cool! Glad you figured it out.

The main cause of this problem is FTP'ing text files in binary mode. Most FTP programs have an auto mode where they use the file extension (or the file type on a Mac) to determine whether to transfer the file in ASCII or binary mode.

Given that .cfg is not a commonly used file extension (as compared to .txt or .html for files needing ascii mode and .gif and .jpg as files needing binary mode), I suspect that the problem is not with DreamWeaver, but with your FTP program. You need to force your FTP program to transfer mt.cfg in ASCII mode. If you FTP a text file in ASCII mode, the end of line characters should be converted automatically. Some FTP programs maintain a list of file extensions or types that you can map to ASCII mode or binary mode. If not, you can always set the mode manually before each transfer.

A handy tool for fixing end of line character differences between Windows and Unix is a Unix/Linux shell program called dos2unix. If you open a file in an editor on a Unix box and notice a ^M at the end of each line, that means the Windows/DOS end of line characters did not get converted to Unix end of line characters. I think dos2unix will handle files with Mac end of line characters, too.

For more info, type the following at a shell prompt:

$ dos2unix --help

Robert
http://www.wombatnation.com/