Installing OpenSolaris

Up till now I’ve had a Linux box in the base­ment, run­ning Apache and serving up a couple of web­sites, as well as act­ing as a fire­wall. Giv­en the box is an old Pen­ti­um 3, bought some 12 years ago, I’ve been nervous that it’s about to die at any moment, leav­ing me fire­wall-less and with a big job to migrate the web­sites in a hurry (yes, they’re backed up on a dif­fer­ent box, just in case). Both are good reas­ons to upgrade. Since Sol­ar­is is meant to be robust, secure, and all those oth­er good things, I figured I may as well see if it’s ready for prime time for home use serving websites.

First, the hard­ware. Tim had a spare Ultra 20 (what can I say? We seem to accu­mu­late com­puters without really try­ing to). That should run Word­Press a little faster than the old Pen­ti­um 3…

Next, the soft­ware. Installing OpenSol­ar­is 2008.11 was a snap — burn the CD of the iso image, put it in, turn it on, fol­low the instruc­tions. When Sol­ar­is boots from the LiveCD, hit the “install” icon and wait a bit. Quick­er and easi­er than most oth­er OSes I’ve tried recently! I con­sidered using zones, but then decided I was going to use the entire sys­tem for serving a couple of web­sites and for me there was­n’t much bene­fit to secur­ing them from each oth­er. If I were allow­ing oth­ers access to the web­sites, or was­n’t sure what people would do with them, installing each in its own zone would be a good idea, but it would be overkill for me right now. I can always add a zone later (or a vir­tu­al OS, for that mat­ter) if I want to play around with oth­er stuff. I did turn on TimeSlider though, to make rolling back errors easier.

Now to the fun stuff, set­ting up Apache. I’m used to the Debi­an way of doing things (Debi­an always Has Its Own Way To Do Things), so I need to fig­ure out the Sol­ar­is Apache way. First, I installed the soft­ware. That’s easy, you just fol­low the instruc­tions at Set­ting Up Your AMP Devel­op­ment Envir­on­ment, using pfexec pkg install amp-dev. I have no need to save disk space, so I installed the lot and ini­tial­ized it per the instruc­tions. Next, I wanted to make sure it was up to date. It looked much easi­er than the last time I tried to update a Sol­ar­is install­a­tion; there’s a menu item under Sys­tem called Package Manager which brings up a pro­gram that looks easy enough to use. Update All should mer­rily go off and update everything. First it announced it would cre­ate a boot image, which seemed to suc­ceed, and then it tried to install the rest, res­ult­ing in an error message: 

An unknown error occured while installing
updating or removing packages

Please let the developers know about this problem by filing
a bug at http://defect.opensolaris.org

Exception value: 
[Errno 17] File exists: '/tmp/tmppGRerC'

(spelling mis­take theirs).

Just to be sure that the /tmp dir­ect­ory was cleaned out prop­erly, and noth­ing weird was going on, I rebooted. And was presen­ted with what looks like a GRUB menu with three items. Which should I choose? I don’t know, so I picked the bot­tom one, opensolaris‑1, since that was­n’t there last time I booted. This time, the Update Man­ager announced that updates were avail­able, if I clicked on the icon, which I did, but no updates appeared to be avail­able, which was a little weird. So I went back to the Pack­age Man­ager to try to install the updates I’d down­loaded last time, and it claimed there were no updates avail­able either. OK, maybe I’ll believe it.

Now it’s time to read the doc­u­ment­a­tion on set­ting up the web stack. I know, real pro­gram­mers don’t RTFM, but I nev­er claimed to be a real pro­gram­mer, so I’m allowed to.

More later…