Troubleshooting Puppet PostgreSQL Locale Mismatches

I’ve been doing some work lately with VMware Hyperic Server and Puppet, and I’ve been having issues where the Puppet Labs PostgreSQL module refuses to create a PostgreSQL database for me. I try to call it with: class { ‘postgresql’: charset => ‘UTF8’, }-> class { ‘postgresql::server’: config_hash => { ‘listen_addresses’ => ‘127.0.0.1’, ‘manage_redhat_firewall’ => true, ‘postgres_password’ => ‘goatsaresupercool’, }, require => Mount[‘/var/lib/pgsql’], } postgresql::db { ‘HQ’: user => ‘hyperic’, password => ‘sheeparecooltoo’, require => Class[‘postgresql::server’], } …and it throws this error into Puppet’s output: Error: /usr/bin/initdb –encoding ‘UTF8’ –pgdata ‘/var/lib/pgsql/data’ returned 1 instead of one of [0] “No problem,” I said. Since Puppet is kind enough to give me the command it’s trying I switched to the postgres user …

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Strange Characters in My WordPress Blog

In late August I moved my blog from a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 to a host running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. With it came an upgrade to MySQL, from 4 to 5. The migration itself seemed pretty painless, as I was able to recompile Apache on the new host and just copy everything over intact. I moved the databases by dumping each one and importing them on the other side. A week ago I was doing some work on the blog and noticed that for every apostrophe there were three other characters now: ’. I use a lot of apostrophes, and it sort of sucks to have every “it’s” become “it’s”. More specifically, it was only …

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