FreeTDS Development Group

["Peter C. Norton" <spacey-freetds.org AT ssr.com>]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 09:55:32AM -0500, jklowden AT schemamania.org wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 02, 2010 at 09:12:51AM +0100, Boniforti Flavio wrote:
> > > The current version of osql does indeed parse ldd output if 
> > > strings(1) fails to find any candidates.  I'm interested in 
> > > improving the script to deal with any environments to which I 
> > > don't have access.  It's a sort of on-going experiment in 
> > > whether or not a simple bourne shell script can identify all 
> > > odbc configuration problems.  
> 
> Hello Flavio, 
> 
> > how would I be helped in my issue, having troubles connecting to MSSQL
> > from Debian Sid?
> 
> I have found over the years that ODBC problems are tedious and repetitive. 
> It always works, but it's easy to make a small mistake, and any small
> mistake results in pretty much the same "cannot connect" error.  I wrote 
> the osql script to automate the advice normally provided, to check each
> part of the configuration and report when something looks wrong.  
> 
> It's trickier than it might look to do correctly.  For example, isql will 
> not report where it looks for its odbc.ini.  So the osql script tries to 
> infer that by searching the binary and parsing ldd(1) output.  And then 
> there are the usual portability issues, such as the versions of sed(1) 
> and awk(1), and the options they accept.  But after 11 tries we seem to 
> be making some progress!
> 
> If you haven't already, make sure you're using the latest revision of 
> the osql script, currently 1.11.  You can extract it from the nightly
> tarball.  
> 
> Run it.  If it doesn't work -- i.e. if it doesn't start isql and fails to 
> give you a good diagnostic -- run it verbosely:
> 
>       sh -x osql ...
> 
> Post the output here, and let's see.  
> 

James,

Quick note about the script: if you're on a platform with
ksh/bash/zsh, can you have autoconf/configure replace #!/bin/sh with
the more capable shell?  On unix variants that have a true bourne
shell, a lot of things don't work as expected with /bin/sh.

-Peter