I have been happily hosted at pair Networks for about twelve years now. A few days ago, one of the users on their private newsgroups asked if anyone had compiled MapServer there. I had never compiled MapServer before, so I figured that I was incredibly qualified to help 
Normally MapServer appears to be fairly simple to install, but there were a couple annoying complications in my scenario. The first was that pair Networks runs exclusively on FreeBSD. The second was that it is an entirely managed service: no root access allowed, no ability to run ldconfig, no changes to php.ini. The net result was that all of the dependencies had to be compiled in static mode, and that a custom PHP CGI had to be used so that the extension_dir could be overridden.
The notes that I took during installation are available if anyone is interested. These are not guaranteed to be accurate, but are pretty close. If you are on pair Networks and trust me (are you crazy?) you can see if the binaries (5 MB) work for you. They are mostly static, so there shouldn’t be any dependencies other than the standard pair libraries, but you never know until you try…
As long as I had it compiled I felt the need to play around. I grabbed some test data from the awesome OSGeo4W project (which allows Windows users to run a large part of the OSGeo stack without hassles) and put them up on my site:
I did run into some problems that I didn’t take the time to solve. I couldn’t get GEOS to link into MapServer properly, and there were some issues with some of the image formats in GDAL. I’m sure that these could have been overcome in time, but it’s the end of the weekend and I have to get back to real life
-J
1ChrisWebster on Apr 9, 2008 at 12:28 pm:
You really need to get out more… :-))
Nice to see the MapServer demos actually working, as my home installation (MS4W from http://maptools.org/ms4w/) is still …er… a work in progress.
Have you seen any documentation on the Fusion API for MapServer yet? I’m interested in trying it out with MapServer (not enough hardware for MapGuide OS), but can’t find any docs to get me started…
Cheers, Chris
2Jason Birch on Apr 9, 2008 at 4:46 pm:
Yes… yes I do
OSGeo4W is a continuation of the MS4W project, and has a fusion demo application available in it.
The Fusion JS API isn’t well documented yet, but there is a host of other docs available on the Fusion site:
http://trac.osgeo.org/fusion/
3ChrisWebster on Apr 10, 2008 at 3:10 am:
Thanks for the tips. So now I guess I’ll try installing OSGeo4W instead. Maybe I’m the one who should get out more….
4Richard Marsden on May 15, 2008 at 8:18 am:
Hello, I’m the “one of the users on the private Pair newsgroups”, and I now have something to show for my (and Jason’s) efforts. The main map can be found here:
http://www.ecomapcostarica.com/map/index.shtml
This is a preliminary map. We will be in the field from 26th May for about a week. We intend to have some live map updates and to get the students blogging. Real ecological data and student reports won’t be uploaded until after we return.
This is implemented using MapServer and OpenLayers. Further annotation and icons are added using a KML layer in OpenLayers. The grid is ‘manually’ drawn in Javascript (this was actually easier than creating the coordinates in Excel/Python/whatever and creating a KML file). Even without the multi-source layers, I found that adding OpenLayers greatly improved the user experience - along the same principles as AJAX.
A second map page uses Virtual Earth for the base layer, but this does not work so well when zoomed in and it prefers Internet Explorer.
Once we had it built, the MapServer side of things is pretty simple - data is in the form of SHP files or GeoTIFF. Both have been tiled and indexed.
Thanks Jason!