Category: Technology

To-Do List for OpenSolaris Installation

The next step in the OpenSol­ar­is odys­sey (here’s the first post) is to come up with the to-do list. I will prob­ably for­get a few things, but this list will get me star­ted (and remind me when I have to do this again in the future). Since I’m doing this for my per­son­al web sites, I don’t have to be ter­ribly effi­cient about meth­od­o­logy, as long as it all works in the end.

  • fig­ure out which web sites I want to rep­lic­ate on the new sys­tem and their require­ments for soft­ware and lan­guages (Ruby? Perl?) [mostly done]
  • find out how to change the DynDNS set­tings auto­mat­ic­ally on OpenSol­ar­is, i.e., wheth­er the script I’ve used without touch­ing for years on Debi­an will work
  • fig­ure out how to con­fig­ure vir­tu­al hosts on OpenSol­ar­is Apache, which is bound to be dif­fer­ent to the Debi­an Apache way of doing things [done]
  • set up log file archiv­ing and roll-over [done]
  • down­load and install Word­Press, one for each Word­Press sys­tem I main­tain [done]
  • down­load and install the pack­ages for the oth­er sites I run

Feed Oddities

My blog feed is behav­ing oddly and I can­’t quite fig­ure out what’s going on. I’ll post when I’ve found out enough to give a sali­ent descrip­tion, and when I find a solu­tion. Hope­fully it won’t take too long.

Update: it turns out to have been the Bird­Feed­er plu­gin, com­poun­ded with a stub­born cache. Guess I have to do some more work on fig­ur­ing out how to get Mint to work prop­erly with the site, but that can wait until tomorrow.

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…

Another WP Update

Hav­ing just updated my blog to the latest in the 2.6 series, it was time to go for the 2.7 series. Nor­mally I wait a couple of days for oth­er people to flush out the bugs, but I figured I’d be big and brave on this one, giv­en it’s Fri­day afternoon. 

As usu­al with Word­Press, the upgrade went flaw­lessly, even the few plu­gins I use installed without com­plain­ing. If you notice any­thing, let me know; it might take a while before I stumble on it. 

The new admin dash­board will take some get­ting used to. I don’t know yet wheth­er I prefer it to the old one or not, it looks more com­plic­ated but that could just be because it’s unfamiliar. 

And I’m try­ing out Mint for stat­ist­ics. I wrote a small plu­gin to add the code to the right place on the pages which seems to work. Now all I have to do is fig­ure out how to dis­reg­ard the spuri­ous vis­its.

Multi-location brainstorming

In my cur­rent pro­ject at Sun, I’m pro­gram manager/project lead­er for a team that is spread over sev­er­al loc­a­tions. Up till now we’ve man­aged with phone calls and email and wikis and occa­sion­al phys­ic­al meet­ings, but with travel budgets being cut, I’d like to explore oth­er ways of col­lab­or­at­ing that give more of the “group clustered around a white­board” feel when we need it. It is often the case that group dis­cus­sions lead to bet­ter designs and bet­ter ideas than indi­vidu­als alone tend to come up with; how do we make those group dis­cus­sions work bet­ter when we can­’t all attend one phys­ic­al meet­ing? What tools, or books, or best prac­tices exist that I haven’t heard of yet? Wikis have many uses in multi-loc­a­tion soft­ware devel­op­ment, but they don’t give that spark that I’m look­ing for. What does?

More non-spam

The false pos­it­ive prob­lem with Gmail con­tin­ues, in the last few days the fol­low­ing have wrongly gone into the spam bucket

  • noti­fic­a­tion of my bank state­ment (nev­er used to go into spam, so this is a new problem)
  • noti­fic­a­tions about my tod­dler­’s music class
  • my son’s class list
  • Bob Park’s “What’s New” newsletter
  • a reply to email to the pub­lic W3C DOM mail­ing list (the ori­gin­al email made it through ok)
  • a request from someone to use one of my photos

Few of them match the prob­lems to which Gmail prof­fers solu­tions. I’m going to have to rethink what I do for travel and week­ends and stop using Gmail as a pass-through spam filter.