spack++

I spent quite a bit of time getting mod_perl, apache and mysql to play nice on solaris (the nevada builds) some few months ago.  I eventually found CoolStack and after some amount of effort got up and running.  A nice private wiki page documented each command needed to get up and running on a solaris zone.  Recently I got a new X4150 from Sun and wanted to try out their project indiana stuff, which I guess is really OpenSolaris proper.  Oh, and I want my samp to run from inside a zone, did I mention that?

My goal for this post is to go from a fresh OpenSolaris 2008.11 zone and to get this one-liner to work

• perl -e “use DBI;my \$dbh=DBI->connect(‘DBI:mysql:database=mysql’, ‘root’, ”);print ‘ping=’ . \$dbh->ping . qq{\n}”

Here is an overview

1. Install OpenSolaris 2008.11.
2. Create a zone, which I called tester3, since my first couple attempts didn’t go so hot
3. Install some packages
4. Start some services
5. Install some perl packages
6. Give it a go!

After 1 and 2, let’s see where we are.  Just for kicks, let’s give our one-liner a shot.  I get

-bash: perl: command not found

Turns out that the zones create in OpenSolaris are pretty dang bare, as per this article.  In fact, many programs, like less and telnet, that I expected to have there, weren’t.  Using this page, and this command

• pkg search -lr telnet

helped quite a bit.  Looks like my zone starts with 54 packages.  Sun’s Web Stack project provides an amp-dev package, so let’s install that and a couple other things for 3.

• pkg install sunstudioexpress SUNWperl584usr amp-dev

As per the article above, the packages get pulled down and all together those three packages look to be 585.31 megs, so it takes a minute or ten to get downloaded via my cable modem connection.

Once installed I try again and get

• Can’t locate DBI.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/perl5/5.8.4/lib/i86pc-solaris-64int /usr/perl5/5.8.4/lib /usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4/i86pc-solaris-64int /usr/perl5/site_perl/5.8.4 /usr/perl5/site_perl /usr/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.4/i86pc-solaris-64int /usr/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.4 /usr/perl5/vendor_perl .) at -e line 1.  BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at -e line 1.

DBD::mysql seems to install better with mysql up and running, so as per the Administering MySQL Server section of this page, we

• svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/application/database/mysql.xml
• svcadm enable application/database/mysql:version_50

The DBD::mysql tests want to run mysql_config, so we need to get that in the PATH

• export PATH=$PATH:/usr/mysql/5.0/bin

Now we’re ready to install DBI and DBD::mysql.  The first time or two through I tried installing the SUNWpmdbi package, but it didn’t play well (perhaps because it is like a year old), so instead I do

• perl -MCPAN -e shell
• install Test::More DBI DBD::mysql

Perhaps a little too hard, but now, so, nice!

• root@tester3:~# perl -e “use DBI;my \$dbh=DBI->connect(‘DBI:mysql:database=mysql’, ‘root’, ”);print ‘ping=’ . \$dbh->ping . qq{\n}”
• ping=1

Time to try out mod_perl.

If any Sun or web stack folks are reading, including packages for DBD::mysql and a more modern DBI would be great 🙂  And maybe adding the mysql bin to the path?

Enjoy!

Earl

For years and years I have been vaguely to quite interested in locations.  Kind of travelling around stuff.  Like shortest routes and the like.  And the more I think about it, the more I am interested in being able to track where I go daily.  Not sure why I would ever care, but here are types of questions I may sometimes care about

1. How many times have I eaten at yamato in the past few months?
2. Do I get to work earlier during the summer?
3. How long does it take me to walk to / from my car?

db = ctx.openDatabase(DATABASE_NAME, null);

Well, I bit the bullet and moved the front page and administration portions of holaservers.com over to google app engine.  It was a fair amount of work, and you might be asking why.  Well, here are a few reasons

1. At good old united online, quite a bit of money and effort was expended trying to keep the front page highly available and serving fast.  Well, would be nice to get such services nearly for free.
2. A good excuse to learn some more python.
3. Kind of because I could.  I had much of the required information available via web services, so it wasn’t TOO hard to move things over to google.
4. If a user is logged into Gmail and on holaservers, I can send email via their Gmail account.  I am hoping this is huge.  It means that I am not sending any unsolicited email from spack servers.  Folks are really just sending to their contacts via their Gmail accounts.
5. Maybe I could go speak at a conference about it.  I have done (I think) a pretty good proof of concept for moving portions of legacy systems to google app engine.

So why not move everything?

1. At the heart of holaservers is an ftp server.  Kind of the vision for getting stuff to your site.  Since google AFAIK only listens on port 80 for their stuff, ftp is out of the question.  I guess I could get a flash / java / whatever file uploader working that speaks my webservice, and there you go.
2. DNS.  bob.holaservers.com would have to be set up as a different application to resolve to google.  You only get ten, so there you go.  Kind of the same story with bob.com.

As part of the move, I got my stuff working on selenium again.  SO cool!  It has caught many a bug.  Probably the hardest thing about moving over was breaking cache.  I wrote a little web service proxy to handle my old javascript requests and the app engine really tried to hang on to cache.  I ended up sending everything through a single method that included a .epoch variable to break on through.  I also needed to add something to proxy through the remote ip address securely since I depend on such things quite a bit.

Python huh?  Yeah, python.  Got to admit that it has been a little rough going.  I got paid to learn perl while a math grad student at BYU, and continued to learn it on the job for seven years at united, et. al.  While at united I got paid to do some java training and the church has been kind enough to pay me over the last year to learn more java.  So for perl and java, I could spend quite a bit of time learning this and that.  Python I have really just tried to get things done and don’t have any sort of big picture.  “Python” has also meant django, which has a learning curve all its own.  And since I only work on the stuff nearly each night, I have to keep relearning how to get the size of an array, etc.  It took me a good twenty minutes to get a couple email canonization regular expressions working tonight.  Perl would have been wire speed.

Enjoy!

Earl

Here’s the elevator pitch for my cool new site:

Folks

1. post a thesis
2. post arguments for and against said thesis
3. rate arguments
4. comment on theses
5. comment on arguments

What do you think?  Dumb enough to work?  I think it could.  I call it 5arguments.com.  Right now, I have an alpha version working.  So what?  Well, first off, good point.  Second, I wrote it in Python using the new Google App Engine, which is, so far, actually pretty cool.  I figure it is dumb enough that it should actually take off.  Think I will add a few google ad words just to help out with the mortgage and the like.

Hoping to having something up on it pretty quick.

Enjoy!

Earl