tech.sweetnam.eu

It’s been absolutely ages since I last wrote here and I had been meaning to do so for some time. Since my last entry I have been tinkering away with my setup as I do on a regular basis and plenty of things have changed here on the back end. I suppose I will begin with my my connection and move up the chain from there.

First up is a new router. I picked up a nice Cisco 837 for a very reasonable price. I had a bit of fiddling to get it up and running with eircom broadband but I got there in the end and I have documented the procedure over on my wiki.

Next up is my reverse proxy. It is still running on the same hardware but I decided to move from Linux over to OpenBSD. My primary reason for this is that I was getting sick and tired of Linux iptables. In addition I concluded that Squids performance wasn’t optimal either. A move to OpenBSD seems to have resolved both those issues for me. PF on BSD is very configurable and easy to understand as well. Needless to say I have documented my experiences with PF over on my wiki also.

I’ve also gotten my hands on some new hardware. Well new hardware to me that is. I picked up three Sun Netra T1 servers, a Dell PowerEdge 1750 and two Symantec 5420 Firewall appliances.

So far I have been busy setting up the three Netras. They don’t have CD-ROM drives or display adapters so I had to install them over the network which was a process that was actually relatively simple. However it was only simple in that I already have a couple of other Sun machines here one of which I was able to use as an install server. Of course I have this process documented on my wiki also.

I haven’t decided what I will use the Netras for yet. One of them seems to have CPU problems and has been cannabilised to increase the specs. of the other two. They have 500Mhz UltraSparc IIe CPUs so by todays standards are not at all that powerful but they do draw very little power, certainly less than a Pentium IV machine so I may set them up as file servers. Initially I was hoping to install OpenBSD on one of them to use as my reverse proxy but unfortunately an OpenBSD network install does not seem to be as straight forward as Solaris.

The Poweredge 1750 I had hoped to set up as a webserver running either IIS or Apache. Unfortunately it only has 512MB of RAM so until I get some more for it that rules out Server 2008. However it is incredibly loud and that rules out keeping it running in my computer room. I am currently planning on setting up a dedicated computer room as it were in another part of the house so check back here for update on that.

The Wall Street Journal has an article today that confirms that IBM is having discussions with Sun over a possible acquisition. This isn’t the first time that IBM have had discussions with Sun but given the current economic climate it might be a reall possibility this time around. Also it would potentially be an easy sell to current Sun shareholders who have seen their shares decline steadily in value over recent years.

What will this mean for the technology industry? Well both IBM and Sun overlap in quite a few areas so here are the ones I can think of off the top of my head:

• IBM PowerPC and Sun SPARC CPU’s
• IBM Lotus Symphony and Star/OpenOffice
• IBM DB2 and Sun’s MySQL
• IBM AIX and Sun Solaris
• IBM Storage and Sun Storage/StorageTek

The crown jewels of a take over would probably be Java and MySQL but IBM swallowing up Sun would create more than a few jitters for EMC who presently rule the storage market.

Of course with the potential acquisition of Sun by IBM it will inevitiably compared to the HP take over of Compaq. Bot HP and Compaq were in competition with each other in the enterprise computing market with HP’s PA-RISC based servers competing with Compaq’s Alpha’s (in turn acquired by Compaqs take over of DEC).They also had competing operating systems with HP’s HP-UX vs Compaq Tru64.

Of course it wasn’t long after that merger was completed when HP killed off Alpha and Tru64.

Would IBM kill off SPARC and Solaris? I would speculate that they might kill off SPARC but focus purely on Solaris for x86. It might make sense for IBM to keep Solaris on x86 as they currently don’t have an x86 version of AIX. This is all conjecture of course and as the talks are at an early stage the deal might fall through yet.

Time will tell.

When I originally decided to host from home a few years back I had to do more than just decide to fire up a webserver and NAT from my router to it. Choosing an operating system and web server software and application server was another consideration. Did I want to run Linux? Solaris? Microsoft IIS? and did I want to go with PHP or ASP? What was I going to use as a CMS for my primary site and what blog software would suit my requirements?

Ultimately I decided on OpenBSD with Apache and PHP and Windows + IIS. Of course I knew that over time I would be constantly changing this and I needed a way to effictively manage the domains themselves and the sites and database dumps. Obviously I needed a control panel of some sorts and after a bit of investigation I settled on Virtualmin.

Virtualmin is created by the same people who created the excellent and utterly essential Webmin control panel and as such the Virtualmin module integrates nicely into Webmin. Oh, and it’s free!

Originally this site was hosted on Windows Server and IIS and powered by BlogEngine.NET but I found it a bit of a pain to handle two different types of blogging software so I migrated this blog over to WordPress and host it with my other sites. Over time my other server changed several times from OpenBSD to Ubuntu, then Solaris 10 running on a Sun Workstation, back to Ubuntu and currently onto the Debian machine where they currently reside. With Virtualmin moving platforms was a simple matter of restoring from the backups that I took from the machine that was to be replaced.

Of course with it now being relatively trivial to change servers I find myself experimenting a bit more and I’m currently fighting the urge to move everything over to a FreeBSD server but for the moment I’m successfully resisting that urge!

Want to try something new? Sun’s OpenSolaris is now available for download. OpenSolaris is as the name suggests an open source edition of Sun’s flagship Solaris operating system. However in actuality it is quite different. It seems to be aimed squarely to compete as a viable alternative to the more popular Linux distrubutions. To that end it comes on a live CD like Ubuntu.

Among the notable features is the use of ZFS as the default filesystem and also includes the Xen hypervisor for builtin virtualisation support. It also included a package manager with software available from repositories like Ubuntu. I imagine that Sun intend for technology that is included in OpenSolaris to make it upstream into later versions of the venerable Solaris OS.

At the moment I’m downloading the CD and I’m going to install it on a virtual machine for a look see.

No doubt you have guessed that I’m something of a Sun fan and at times I think to myself that this blog is turning very Sun orientated. This is not the case however as I recently upgraded my mail server to Ubuntu 8.04 from 6.06 and I have no intentions of changing that anytime soon. However I recently moved my main site and personal blog over to one of my Sun Blade 2000 workstations. And of course this blog is still powered by Windows and IIS.

Diversity? I’ve heard of it.

Here is an interesting nugget of information for you. The project leader for OpenSolaris is non other than Ian Murdock who was one of the original founders of Debian Linux on which Ubuntu is based.

I’ve had a busy few days patching upgrading and moving sites around.

The two biggest changes were upgrading my mail server from Ubuntu 6.06 to 8.04 which went very smooth indeed and moving all sites hosted on my Fedora powered Dell Poweredge over to Solaris 10 running on one of my Sun machines.

As well as the above I also moved my reverse proxy from an elderly Pentium III 550 to a much more modern and powerful P4 3Ghz machine. I’ve also moved my outgoing proxy onto the second of my Sun Machines which is now running the latest version of Squid which at the time of writing this is 3.0 STABLE4. All my windows machines have also been patched and updated and my last remaining XP machine is now eagerly awaiting the release of service pack 3 which is being released tomorrow. Come to think of it I’ve just realised that my XP machine has been running the preview release of SP3 since it was released some time back (v.3264). No doubt I’m going to have a nightmare task ahead in installing the proper release.

But getting back to the Dell Poweredge and why I moved everything over to one of the Suns. I have a task in mind for the Poweredge but this task involves Windows Server. I actually have a licensed version of Windows Server 2003 for it so I have to say goodbye to Fedora

I’ve moved my personal blog over to one of the Sun machines today. As you can imagine Solaris is a completely different beast compared to Linux but there are some similarities. Solaris comes with two versions of Apache installed however I decided I would rather not use either. My main reason for this is that from experience getting PHP working could be a nightmare. Instead I opted to install the latest version of Apache and PHP from Sunfreeware.

Package management under Solaris is completely different that you might be used to under Linux although Slackware users might feel right at home. I also planned to install php-eaccelerator too but that has to be compiled from source so I needed to grab the GCC, automake, autoconf, make and more packages from Sunfreeware. It is worth reading the instructions as you need to grab other packages that will be needed as dependencies. The Solaris package manager does not automatically resolve dependencies but you can install the packages in any order you like after gunzipping them first.

My own procedure for installing packages is to create two directories – /install and /archivedpackages. I download the packages to /install and after installing the software I move the package to /archivedpackages. My reason for this is that I can check /archivedpackages to see what packages I already installed or reinstall as necesary.

It is worth noting at this point that you may get errors when attempting to run some applications as they may be linked to older library versions. In one example that I cam across was a dependency for libstdc++.so.5 which did not exist. I got around this by making a symbolic link to the version that was installed in /usr/local/lib:

ln -s libstdc++so.6.0.3 libstdc++.so.5

Now that I had everything installed it was time to see where everything was located. All the packages I downloaded were installed to /usr/local which is similar to Linux when you compile something from source without specifying a path. Apache now lives at /usr/local/apache2 and MySQL at /usr/local/mysql. GCC and others reside in /usr/local/bin.

Configuring Apache is identical as for any other operating system that it runs on. The httpd.conf is very familar but if you have installed PHP as I did you need to manually add an entry in /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf to load the PHP module and to add ApplicationType for .php files. While you are doing this it might also be a good time to add index.php as an entry for DirectoryIndex. Before we run Apache we need to create a php.ini. So for this we need to do the following:

cp /usr/local/php/doc/php.ini-recommended /usr/local/php/lib

After confirming Apache, PHP and MySQL were working OK it came time to compile and install eaccelerator. This is where things can get a little tricky as neither the eaccelerator site nor the included documentation included instructions for compiling on Solaris.

I downloaded the source and extracted it in my /install directory that I created earlier. From a terminal window, logged in as root we need to make changes to two files. First we need to edit /usr/local/autoheader and change the first line from #! /usr/local/bin/perl to /usr/bin/perl and we also need to do the exact same for /usr/local/bin/autom4ate. Compiling eaccelerator is pretty much as per the quick guide in the instructions but first we need to set the path to the location of PHP and GCC so we do this by:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/php/bin

Now while in the source directory for eaccelerator, run phpize as per the instructions. Hopefully you shouldn’t see any errors. If you haven’t any errors then you can now run the configure script as follows:

./configure –with-eaccelerator-userid=daemon

Once the configure script has finished run make to compile the module.

We do not want to do a make install. Instead while in the eaccelerator source directory we will do the following:

cp modules/eaccelerator.so /usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions

Next up we create the cache directory for eaccelerator

mkdir /tmp/eaccelerator

And make it writable:

chmod 0777 /tmp/eaccelerator

And finally we need to edit /usr/local/php/lib/php.ini and tell it to load the eaccelerator module. So at the end of your php.ini enter the following:

zend_extension=”/usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/eaccelerator.so”
eaccelerator.shm_size=”16″
eaccelerator.cache_dir=”/tmp/eaccelerator”
eaccelerator.enable=”1″
eaccelerator.optimizer=”1″
eaccelerator.check_mtime=”1″
eaccelerator.debug=”0″
eaccelerator.filter=”"
eaccelerator.shm_max=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_ttl=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_only=”0″
eaccelerator.compress=”1″
eaccelerator.compress_level=”9″

Now that everything is configured we start up Apache with the following:

/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start

To verify that eaccelerator is working you can enter the following in a terminal:

/usr/local/php/bin/php -v

If it is successfully installed you will see something like this:

PHP 5.2.5 (cli) (built: Dec  3 2007 07:40:48)
Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies
with eAccelerator v0.9.5.2, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator

And there you have it. A nice Solaris, Apache, MySQL and PHP accelerated stack for all your web serving requirements.

I mentioned over on my personla blog that I travelled to Dublin yesterday to collect two Sun Blade 2000 workstations. I've now got both of them up and running.

They are both identical machines with a 900Mhz UltraSPARC III CPU, 1GB of RAM and a 76GB FC-AL hard disk. I was pondering what to do with both of them. I was considering adding the CPU and RAM and hard disk from one to the other but in the end I decided to use them both.

Solaris 8 was installed on both but for obvious reasons I wasn't give the root password which meant that I had to install an OS on them from scratch. As it happened I had a copy of Solaris 10 for Sparc on DVD but neither of the machines had a CD-ROM or DVD drive which kind of left me scuppered as neither have support for IDE and are SCSI only. I had an old SCSI CD-ROM drive kicking around but obviously that wasn't going to be much good with a DVD edition of Solaris.

While considering my options I happened to look at my HP9000 and lo and behold it has a SCSI DVD drive. I yanked it out and stuck it onto the first Sun machine and it wouldn't work. probe-scsi-all found it but it transpires that Sun's OpenBoot looks for a CD or DVD drive on SCSI ID6 so it was a quick matter of changing the jumpers, 'Stop+A' , 'boot cdrom' and an hour or so later Solaris 10 was up and running.

Happy at this stage I considered installing Solaris 10 onto the second one but I decided to break with the norm and I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu 7.10 for Sparc instead. I downloaded the server edition so I haven't had a chance to install X on it yet but installation was just as easy as it would be on commodity x86 hardware. One nice feature is that by default, once installed, the Vesa frame buffer is enabled. At a guess (I haven't checked yet) it looks like the default terminal is 1024×768.

Here is some info from the Ubuntu one:

Linux sparc2 2.6.22-14-sparc64 #1 Sun Oct 14 21:57:46 GMT 2007 sparc64 GNU/Linux

cpu             : TI UltraSparc III+ (Cheetah+)
fpu             : UltraSparc III+ integrated FPU
prom            : OBP 4.5.16 2002/05/01 19:28
type            : sun4u
ncpus probed    : 1
ncpus active    : 1
D$ parity tl1   : 0
I$ parity tl1   : 0
Cpu0ClkTck      : 0000000035a4e900
MMU Type        : Cheetah+

0000:00:00.0 Host bridge: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. Schizo PCI Bus Module
0000:00:01.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL (rev 27)
0000:00:05.0 Bridge: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO EBUS (rev 01)
0000:00:05.1 Ethernet controller: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO 10/100 Ethernet [eri] (rev 01)
0000:00:05.2 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO 1394 (rev 01)
0000:00:05.3 USB Controller: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. RIO USB (rev 01)
0000:00:06.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c875 (rev 37)
0000:00:06.1 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c875 (rev 37)
0001:00:00.0 Host bridge: Sun Microsystems Computer Corp. Schizo PCI Bus Module
0001:00:04.0 SCSI storage controller: QLogic Corp. QLA2200 64-bit Fibre Channel Adapter (rev 05)

Time to play arount a bit more

Sun are on a bit of a spending spree lately, not content with having acquired MySQL recently, now they have splashed out and bought innotek. Innotek are the creators of VirtualBox which would be seen as a competitor to VMwares Workstation line of products.

Perhaps the main point of interest is that VirtualBox is open source whereas VMware is not. However it just goes to show just how important virtualisation has become.

Virtualisation a go go.

For anyone interested in experimenting with Sun Solaris Express but are unwilling to download an ISO weighing in at over 4Gb then check out the latest edition of Linux User and Developer Magazine. The cover DVD contains all you need.

As I mentioned on my personal blog, distributing Solaris with a Linux magazine is like getting a big chocolate cake free with a box of Kellogs Special K.

I’m busy installing it on a virtual machine at the moment so I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl.