Open Source and Closed Source (Update)

So I recently converted my work server over from Fedora Core 4 to Debian 4.0 (Etch). I figured it would be better to have an operating system that does not have a six month release cycle, that way it wouldn't be out dated and would still have support. The conversion went well, everything works, except the unixODBC and FreeTDS bridge I had on Fedora.

Debian contains the FreeTDS package, so I installed that and I also installed unixODBC (all from the repositories), added the required configuration lines required and it still didn't work. It apparently can't find a driver. A quick search shows that the driver file /usr/lib/libtdsodbc.so is required, and the file exists and is a symbolic link to /usr/lib/libtdsodbc.so.0.0.0 and that file DOES NOT exist.

After doing some searching online, it turns out I might have to compile FreeTDS from source. So I downloaded the latest version of FreeTDS source, extracted it, read the README file, figured out the switches I would need, and compiled it. It compiled just fine, then I realized I didn't compile it with unixODBC. I then did a re-compile with unixODBC enabled, and part way through the make operation it threw up and crashed. Turns out there were some files it was looking for in the FreeTDS directory that WERE NOT included!

Turns out, I don't think I can use unixODBC or FreeTDS to connect to the MSSQL database. Instead I have mounted a samba share in linux and have a scheduled command on the Windows server to do a dump of the table, then read the text file via PHP and copy the data that way.

If anyone knows how to get FreeTDS and unixODBC working in Debian, please please let me know.