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:

• Itasca Demo
• Gmap Demo
• Gmap Fusion Demo

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