Dirk.Net

Just as note to self:

Enable Regular Expressions and search for

[\r\n]

Nuff said.

If your Apache2 server fails to start after installing SSL (recommended guides are here and here), and get an error in your logs (probably at /var/log/apache2/error.log on Ubuntu) such as

SSL Library Error: 218529960 error:0D0680A8:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_CHECK_TLEN:wrong tag

SSL Library Error: 218595386 error:0D07803A:asn1 encoding routines:ASN1_ITEM_EX_D2I:nested asn1 error

be sure you have the correct “tags” in your certificate file: It should start with (if PEM-encoded)

-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----

and end with

-----END CERTIFICATE-----

including all hyphens (five on each side). The leading hyphens might get eaten when you cut and paste to your server from your local machine.

Update (Aug. 28, 2011): You may want to check out tiny_tds which obviates many of the below settings and gives you a richer and more scalable connection than ODBC.

If you get

Unicode data in a Unicode-only collation or ntext data cannot be sent to clients using DB-Library (such as ISQL) or ODBC version 3.7 or earlier.

when connecting to SQL Server from Linux via FreeTDS, you don’t set the FreeTDS version correctly.

To use SQL Server from Rails, I usually just create shared DSNs in /etc/odbc.ini (Ubuntu) with connection information that looks like so:

[SQLServerLocal]
Description  = FreeTDS
Driver  = FreeTDS
Server  = 192.168.0.1
Trace = No
Database  = my_database
TDS_Version = 8.0
Port  = 1433

Note the syntax: It must be Server, NOT Servername *Update: this only applies to the odbc.ini setup used here, if you need to read client charset = UTF-8 from freetds.conf, it has to be Servername, see update below* and TDS_Version has an underscore.

The standard ODBCConfig visual tool will usually set “Servername” instead of “Server” and this will not work.

The above settings should just work (provided FreeTDS is installed correctly) with the ActiveRecord SQL Server adapter and these settings in database.yml:

development:
adapter: sqlserver
mode: odbc
dsn: SQLServerLocal
database: my_database
username: some_user
password: secret
encoding: utf8

Also be sure to read general instruction on how to get Linux clients talk to SQL Server,  as well as the rails setup and connectivity for different clients.

Update: Turns out I still got errors such as

unixODBC][FreeTDS][SQL Server]Error converting characters into server’s character set. Some character(s) could not be converted

when using the “odbc.ini”-only setup outlined above.

It may be necessary to have the ODBC driver read the

client charset = UTF-8

from the /etc/freetds/freetds.conf file. And it can be set only there, not in the odbc.ini definition.

SO for example if you have this definition in your freetds.conf:

[sqlserver_local]
host = localhost
port = 1433
tds version = 8.0
client charset = UTF-8

the odbc.ini above has to be changed to:

[SQLServerLocal]
Description  = FreeTDS
Driver  = FreeTDS
Servername = sqlserver_local
Trace = No
Database  = my_database
TDS_Version = 8.0
Port  = 1433

Note that Server = has to be changed to Servername =. Hope it helps.

Just a reminder: To get a the full backtrace when running RSpec, either use the -b option,

script/spec -b /path/to/spec.rb 

or add

--backtrace

to your spec.opts. Here are the other options for either the opts file or the command line.

Just for the record, as this can be hard go google. If you need old and legacy versions of Netbeans, you can find them through this page:

http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/dev.php

Besides all releases, it also gets you to all build types including nightly, daily, milestone etc., acting as a way-back machine for Netbeans developers and users.