FreeBSD and custombuild, perhaps not a good choice?

Last year we decided to add another server, and seeing how FreeBSD 7's ip stack is a fair bit quicker than the previous versions, and the fact that we'd be using it for quite a while we decided to use FreeBSD 7(.0).

It's been nothing but worries and troubles and endless nights of trying to put right that which had gone wrong. We've started over some 6 times now and still no joy.

First we went with the HOWTO: DA Installing on FreeBSD 7.0 64-bit AMD64 which didn't work at all. When we finally got rid of php problems suphp didn't work as it should, and neither did MySQL. After 4 times trying and reinstalling we just quit and decided to just use custombuild, no extras.

2 server reinstalls later we still didn't have a server of production-worthy status. When we thought all was well Installatron didn't quite agree, or there were other problems.

This past weekend we decided to still use custombuild but revert to apache 1.3. Now apache doesn't want to cooperate. After a clean install it just quits at start on

Starting httpd: [ OK ]
Syntax error on line 15 of /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf:
Cannot load /usr/lib/apache/mod_vhost_alias.so into server: /usr/lib/apache/mod_vhost_alias.so: Undefined symbol "ap_os_is_path_absolute"

Click to expand...

I'm at my wits end. Does anybody have any suggestions? Not just about the lastest problem but about the whole story. I'm sure there must be someone who succeeded in getting a server up & running much like we were planning. It's just that 2 months of this is really getting on my nerves.

64-bit FreeBSD isn't suported. Might that be your problem?

Jeff

We're not running 64bit. We're running 32bit.

First we went with the HOWTO: DA Installing on FreeBSD 7.0 64-bit AMD64

Click to expand...

You can see why the confusion. I think we can normally rightfully assume that if you are following instructions for a 64bit system 64bit is what you have. Otherwise you are following the wrong instructions to begin with.

floyd:
I can see that, sure. We do have a 64bit system (hardware) but we decided to keep running 32bit. There's nothing in the howto that's specific to 64bit as far as I can tell. I know step 5 says "Reinstalling of libiconv, because during DA install it was rewrited to 32-bit." but seeing as how we're using


and the directadmin installation also makes libiconv unusable it's not exactly a 64bit related problem.


smtalk:
I found that link a couple of days ago. I couldn't get it to do anything useful. But seeing it again I noticed I was in the wrong directory. Ofcourse it has already been a few hours that I was tinkering away at it. Wasn't all that clear anymore.

So I redid it as you suggested. There was a bit of compiling. Copying the compiled modules over to /usr/lib/apache, starting apache: