[prog] Perl DBD-ODBC remote server

[Meryll Larkin]

1/21/06

Hi Everyone,

The company I work for has a secured Intranet and we want to display live
data on it from our Accounting Database (read-only from queries - easy - I
don't have to worry about record locking, etc). 
 
The Accounting Database is Informix.  I've already written a Perl-CGI
test-program that accesses the Database (using DBI and DBD::Informix) and
spits out data from a SQL query in HTML format, so my work should be done,
right?  

Well, no such luck.  The Accounting database and the Intranet live on two
different Servers (both 'nix) on the same LAN, different static IPs,
different hostnames (I've got them, I'm the Sys Admin as well as test
programmer). 

Has anyone done this?  I have MANY very specific questions.  I'm going to
present just a couple of them here and after I get answers to those, I may
need to recontact for the rest.

First, I have been advised that the most "standard" way is to put all the
scripting on the Web Server side and to access the remote Database with
DBD::ODBC (it has been suggested to me that DBD/Informix does not have the
capability to pull data from a remote Database - I'll assume this is true
unless anyone tells me differently and shows me a bit of code).

I'm having some difficulty installing DBD::ODBC.  Here's what the perl
Makefile.PL spits out:

The DBD::ODBC module needs to link with an ODBC 'Driver Manager'.
(The Driver Manager, in turn, needs one or more database specific ODBC
drivers.
The DBD::ODBC module does _not_ include any ODBC drivers!)

Now I'm stumped.  What would be a 'Driver Manager' and where would I find
one?  Which Server does the 'Driver Manager' get installed on?  

Then it says:
If you do not have an ODBC Driver Manager you can try building
the free iODBC Driver Manager in the iodbcsrc directory.

Now I feel really dumb because I can't find an iodbcsrc directory on my
server.  It must be somewhere on CPAN?  My best guess is that it means this:
http://search.cpan.org/src/TIMB/DBD-ODBC-0.20/iodbcsrc/
Of course I could be wrong.....

Also, I've assigned a port to the Informix service, but I don't see it
showing up on chkconfig --list.  Should I?  Maybe we'll leave that question
for later....  or for Techtalk.

Guidance from someone with programming experience (or closely related
experience) would be appreciated!


TIA
Meryll Larkin