a dearth of packages

Friday, Nov 23. 2007  –  Category: Grommit, OpenSolaris

This Thanksgiving I give thanks for all the packaging work underway in OpenSolaris. I look forward to a day in the future where I don’t have to spend so much time building out packages for all the updated software I need.

I’m building out the new Grommit machine, and part of what Grommit hosts is a whole bunch of Zones. I like to try to keep everything clean with pkg installs, so I’ve spent a good part of the past two days building Solaris (snv_75a) packages for Dovecot, PHP5, and Postfix.

Yes, I realise that packages for these already exist on Blastwave and elsewhere, but I want ones that leverage the Apache2, MySQL, and OpenSSL that Solaris already ships with. Anyway, thankfully the software all built fairly straight-forward which made my life a lot easier.

About the only thing left that I need is SpamAssassin and I’m hoping to use Eric B’s package that he put together for the OpenSolaris mail server for that. Eric passed me the Postfix package they use but unfortunately I ended up needing to rebuild it anyway since I wanted it to have TLS + SASL and authenticate against the Dovecot SASL.

I’ve done migrations of all the ZFS data for the home and web directories (yay for zfs send | ssh zfs receive), and I’ve installed Mailman (which I didn’t bother putting in a package since it cleanly separates itself in its own directory). I did a test migration of the MySQL database (which seemed to barf only on a field named ‘key’, which fortunately was easily worked around by escaping it with backticks). I’m pretty happy with the general build out of the machine so far. When I built out grommit last time it was early on in my days of using Solaris, so in general I’d made a mess of installing software all over the place, some in Blastwave, some from source, and things poorly and sloppily done everywhere. I’m trying to do things properly this time to make it easier to quickly commission zones that don’t require a whole bunch of finangling to get running cleanly.

I wonder if I can get grommit migrated by Sunday. That’d be a nice Thanksgiving surprise.

5 Responses to “a dearth of packages”

  1. Geoff Arnold Says:
    November 23rd, 2007 at 18:20

    You sem to have collected a few spambot trackbacks here, Steve! When I blogged about the Kindle, I got half a dozen spambots in ten minutes. Amazingly industrious, these little nasties!

    Anyway, good progress on the grommit buildout. When you’re done, be sure to document the setup before you let us messy users into the nice clean box…..

  2. UX-admin Says:
    November 24th, 2007 at 05:57

    “I like to try to keep everything clean with pkg installs, so I’ve spent a good part of the past two days building Solaris (snv_75a) packages for Dovecot, PHP5, and Postfix.”

    Did you build PHP using Sun Studio 12 compilers?

    Did you use Sun Studio optimizations?

    Does your PHP have support for SNMP, and most importantly, for Oracle? “Yes, I realise that packages for these already exist on Blastwave and elsewhere, but I want ones that leverage the Apache2, MySQL, and OpenSSL that Solaris already ships with.”

    It seems like such a shame to use a half-baked, wannabe RDBMS like MySQL when Solaris ships with PostgreSQL, a real, high quality RDBMS.

  3. Stephen Lau Says:
    November 24th, 2007 at 10:14

    Did you build PHP using Sun Studio 12 compilers?

    No, Sun Studio 11 - because I had it handy from ON builds.

    Did you use Sun Studio optimizations?

    Yup

    Does your PHP have support for SNMP, and most importantly, for Oracle?

    Nope, why would I need those? I don’t use SNMP or Oracle, so why would I build those in?

    It seems like such a shame to use a half-baked, wannabe RDBMS like MySQL when Solaris ships with PostgreSQL, a real, high quality RDBMS.

    Because I’ve used MySQL for ages, and I don’t relish migrating a database in the middle of this already huge migration. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while but I haven’t had any issues with MySQL myself, so it hasn’t been pressing for me.

  4. UX-admin Says:
    November 25th, 2007 at 04:25

    “Nope, why would I need those? I don’t use SNMP or Oracle, so why would I build those in?”

    Because then other people could benefit from the work you did instead of repeating it. Compiling PHP is not a trivial task, especially if one wants more than bare functionality. It could have saved someone lots of work. “Because I’ve used MySQL for ages, and I don’t relish migrating a database in the middle of this already huge migration. It’s something I’ve thought about for a while but I haven’t had any issues with MySQL myself, so it hasn’t been pressing for me.”

    At least you considered the possibilities, which is already a lot more than most people would do. That’s certainly commendable. I can sure understand how having a legacy DB and switching over would be a dilemma.

  5. UX-admin Says:
    November 25th, 2007 at 04:28

    I forgot to ask, which switches did you pass to Sun Studio?

Leave a Reply

Comments will be sent to the moderation queue.

Recent posts

Categories

Grommit

Mozilla

OpenSolaris

Songbird

Archives

Meta