[ic] Payment methods, file uploads, taxes and disasters

[interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com (Zenon Panoussis)]

4.8.3 + MySQL on RH 7.2 with RPM.

After two days of stubborn Googling for answers, I
have modified foundation towards the beginning of
a shop and I still have a number of questions that
have been asked before. Namely,

- I want to accept postal orders and COD as payment
   methods, but no credit cards at all. The admin
   form for payment methods simply refuses to carry
   out changes. I managed to force the changes by
   editing the tables of accepted credit cards and
   postal order respectively, but that still doesn't
   change the checkout options. How do I fix it?

- Uploading images doesn't work. The fix was in the
   post-4.8.2-CVS and I'm running 4.8.3, so assume
   I'm doing something wrong. Any ideas what? The
   default root:interch ownership to the images link
   has been changed to interch:interch, the images
   directory is a+w and the catalogue is installed
   with G permissions/groups mode.

- I have to charge 6% VAT for EU sales only. I want
   the catalogue to show prices including VAT and the
   total VAT to appear in the checkout sum without
   being added to the total that already includes it.
   Moreover, I want 5,66% VAT to be deducted from
   the inclusive prices on sales to non-EU customers.
   I tried changing the tax from 'state' to 'country'
   and setting it to -5.66 for non-EU countries, to
   no avail. Anyway, even if that worked, it would
   only have solved half the problem. Has anybody
   managed a working solution to this? (Jag vill
   minnas någon från Danmark med just detta problem).

And finally the killer that got me while typing
this posting:

- Suddenly, out of the blue, IC returns "undefined
   catalog" after a restart. This happened after I
   changed a lot of things that couldn't possibly
   cause this and one that could: I changed the MySQL
   user and password. I used the admin interface to
   edit the tables SQL_USER and SQL_PASS (or whatever
   they are called) and I suspect that IC changed its
   own settings, but not those of MySQL.

   The obvious solution,
    # mysql -u root -p mysql
    mysql> grant all on database.* to newuser identified by 'newpass';
    mysql> \q
   didn't help. I attempted
     # grep -r 'newpass' CATROOT/*
   and got hits on binary files that I can't edit
   without breaking yet more things. Strace is not
   very helpful either today, so it looks very much
   as if two days' work is on its way right down the
   drain. The good karma divident of good ideas is
   rather high right now.

Z