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Over the weekend I completed the migration of my local infrastructure over to OpenSolaris.
It went rather smoothly, and has yet to provide fault. I even took the time to optimize my Folding at Home stats project data gathering, reducing each 6 -hourly run from ~25minutes to less than 20seconds. Now that’s optimization. I will eventually get round to publicly releasing some of the features I’ve been quietly working away on. This is (hopefully) not vapourware.
I’ve also started work on a new website for the Edinburgh University Cycling Club. It’s probably going to be another Wordpress, as the host is unlikely to support Rails. Just sorting out some database stuff at the moment.
I’ve had a bit of trouble installing various Rubygems on my system, mostly Hpricot and Ferret which both require some code compilation. In an effort to save others the same trouble, I’ve compiled a list of tips here to make life easier…
- Change your rbconfig.rb file in the RubyGems folder using the one created by Joyent’s Benr. This will help RubyGems find make, cc, gcc etc, which are not in their usual places in Solaris/OpenSolaris.
- Install cc by getting the Sun Studio. You have to be registered, but if you downloaded OpenSolaris from Sun, you’ll already have an account.
- Install gcc3. If you are using BlastWave to manage your packages simply run
pkg-get install gcc3 to get it.
Hopefully this will help some of you out.
Other Great OpenSolaris/Solaris Tips
Fellow Edinburgh Rubyist Graeme Mathieson has put together some great posts on his experiences with Solaris on his new Sun Thumper. Very lucky man!
I received my new server last week, and thus began my quest to try out new things, and move all my stuff from my old server.
My previous OS choice was Ubuntu, and Fedora before that. This time I’ve decided to go down the OpenSolaris route.
Once I got over the initial culture shock of the new environment, found out that the registration screen that appears on login to Gnome desktop is only for Solaris, and then abandoned the GUI altogether, I discovered that OpenSolaris is a very nicely organised and setup OS.
I just did the default full install, and probably got loads of stuff I’ll never use. Once I had bash setup as my default shell, I was off exploring the various features.
My favorite things so far are:
- ZFS Volume management has never been so easy.
- Zones/Containers A (semi-)isolated OS virtualization technique, that makes separating your environment so easy.
- BlastWave Although not actually part of Solaris, this package manager makes installing software almost as simple as apt-get in Ubuntu.
So far I’ve migrated my MySQL server to it’s own isolated Zone, and shall be moving my web servers across in the next few days.
