Compiling things against the Sun Web Stack MySQL
Sun have done an interesting thing with Web Stack 1.4, and have churned out both 32bit and 64bit libraries and binaries for Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc (On Solaris 10 anyway). The 64 bit versions can be found in their amd64 folders, and things like Apache & MySQL can be told to start in 64bit mode by tweaking their manifests. So for example, you have:
In: /opt/webstack/apache2/2.2/bin: ./httpd: ELF 32-bit LSB executable 80386 Version 1 [FPU], dynamically linked, stripped ./amd64/httpd: ELF 64-bit LSB executable AMD64 Version 1 [SSE FXSR CMOV FPU], dynamically linked, stripped
One downside of this is that Sun have forgotten a vital subtlety. There is a header file that ships with MySQL called "my_config.h", which contains SIZEOF_ entries for the data types, eg SIZEOF_LONG. It’s autogenerated by autoconf, and the my_config.h that comes with Sun Web Stack 1.4 contains SIZEOF_ entries that are 64bit sized. There is no 32bit version of the file. This is no good if you want to link against MySQL in 32bit mode. We became aware of this error when compiling MySQL-python 1.3, which includes pyconfig.h as well, which also defines SIZEOF_LONG, so we were getting:
warning: "SIZEOF_LONG" redefined
There are perhaps ways of fixing or getting around this, such as stealing a my_config.h from a 32bit sized MySQL installation and altering the #include statement of whatever you’re compiling. But the safest solution we went with was to compile our own MySQL client from source, doing something along the lines of:
export CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc export CXX=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/CC ./configure --without-server --enable-thread-safe-client --prefix=/opt/mysql_client gmake gmake install
You can then compile your application against this client library. A lot of things that build against mysql use the mysql_config program to get their compiler options. So if you do compile up your own mysql client, you’ll want to make sure it’s mysql_config is in your path.
2 comments March 6th, 2009
Compiling syslog-ng 3.0.1 on Solaris 10
This one was giving me an endless amount of pain, until I realised it was to do with the fact it was trying deperatly hard to compile against static versions of libraries that Solaris only provides dynamically (or something along those lines!).
The Glib Solaris 10 package is too old to be used so we’ll need to grab the latest version of glib and compile this up - it’s fairly easy. You’ll also need to grab and compile libevent (The one written by the author of syslog-ng, not the Linux kernel related dooderywhatsit). Then we can compile up syslog. It doesn’t like Sun Studio, and you’ll want to set –disable-static-linking.
export CFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include -I/usr/sfw/include -I/opt/sfw/include" export CPPFLAGS=$CFLAGS export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib -R/opt/local/lib -L/usr/sfw/lib -R/usr/sfw/lib -L/opt/sfw/lib -R/opt/sfw/lib" export CC=gcc export CXX=g++ ./configure --prefix=/opt/ec --enable-ssl --enable-pcre --disable-ipv6 --disable-static-linking --enable-dynamic-linking --disable-glibtest gmake gmake install
These things are harder than they should be.
3 comments January 30th, 2009
Solaris, Ruby and iconv.
Solaris 10 has a native C library version of iconv. Unfortunately it lacks various features people might want to use, such as transliteration. You can see an example of this here:
# ruby -e "require 'iconv'; p Iconv.iconv('ascii//ignore//translit', 'utf-8', 'Tést')"
-e:1:in `iconv': invalid encoding ("ascii//ignore//translit", "utf-8") (Iconv::InvalidEncoding)
from -e:1
Other people have commented on the problem, for example on this blog here. One suggestion is to install SUNWgnu-libiconv and utilise LD_PRELOAD. The SUNWgnu-libiconv package isn’t around on Solaris 10 (that I know of), so we need to compile up our own libiconv. And LD_PRELOAD is an inelegant, somewhat difficult to implement and potentially dangerous environment variable.
This sadly means we need to recompile things from source. But hey, it’s Solaris! I’m sure you’re used to this by now. So it’s time to get your recompiling hat on and build libiconv and Ruby. A fairly generic build would go something along these lines (feel free to alter all the “/opt/local” paths to suit your own requirements:
# mkdir -p /opt/src
# cd /opt/src
# wget http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.12.tar.gz
# gtar -zxf libiconv-1.12.tar.gz
# cd libiconv-1.12
# ./configure --prefix=/opt/local
# gmake
# gmake install
# cd /opt/src
# cat <<EOF > /tmp/ruby.patch
--- ruby-1.8.6-p287.good/ext/iconv/extconf.rb Mon Feb 12 23:01:19 2007
+++ ruby-1.8.6-p287/ext/iconv/extconf.rb Thu Jan 29 19:07:45 2009
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@
end
end
$defs.push('-DICONV_INPTR_CONST')
+ $DLDFLAGS += ' -L/opt/local/lib -R/opt/local/lib -liconv'
end
if conf
prefix = '$(srcdir)'
--- ruby-1.8.6-p287.good/ext/iconv/iconv.c Thu Jan 29 19:10:58 2009
+++ ruby-1.8.6-p287/ext/iconv/iconv.c Thu Jan 29 18:20:56 2009
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
#include "ruby.h"
#include <errno.h>
-#include <iconv.h>
+#include </opt/local/include/iconv.h>
#include <assert.h>
#include "st.h"
#include "intern.h"
EOF
# wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
# gtar -zxf ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
# cd ruby-1.8.7-p72
# patch -p1
# export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/sfw/lib -R/usr/sfw/lib -L/opt/local/lib -R/opt/local/lib"
# export CFLAGS="-I/usr/sfw/include -I/opt/local/include"
# export CPPFLAGS=$CFLAGS
# ./configure --prefix=/opt/ruby
# gmake
# gmake install
The above patch basically overrides the iconv that’s used. If you’re feeling fruity, you could grab the source to Sun Web Stack and modify their Ruby, which includes DTrace patches.
1 comment January 30th, 2009
Enabling 64bit MySQL on Solaris Sun Web Stack 1.4
Sun Web Stack 1.4 includes both a 32bit and 64bit MySQL, with the standard bin/mysqld and bin/amd64/mysqld binaries.
By default, the SMF service sun-mysql50 runs in 32bit mode. To enable 64bit mode, simply:
# svccfg -s sun-mysql50:default svc:/application/database/sun-mysql50:default> listprop sun-mysql50 application sun-mysql50/action_authorization astring solaris.smf.manage.sun-mysql/default sun-mysql50/bin astring /opt/webstack/mysql/5.0/bin sun-mysql50/data astring /var/opt/webstack/mysql/5.0/data sun-mysql50/value_authorization astring solaris.smf.value.sun-mysql/default sun-mysql50/enable_64bit boolean true method_context framework method_context/group astring mysql method_context/limit_privileges astring :default method_context/privileges astring :default method_context/project astring :default method_context/resource_pool astring :default method_context/supp_groups astring :default method_context/use_profile boolean false method_context/user astring mysql method_context/working_directory astring /var/opt/webstack/mysql general framework general/enabled boolean true restarter framework NONPERSISTENT restarter/logfile astring /var/svc/log/application-database-sun-mysql50:default.log restarter/contract count 105 restarter/start_pid count 606 restarter/start_method_timestamp time 1233237617.117424000 restarter/start_method_waitstatus integer 0 restarter/auxiliary_state astring none restarter/next_state astring none restarter/state astring online restarter/state_timestamp time 1233237617.119195000 svc:/application/database/sun-mysql50:default> setprop sun-mysql50/enable_64bit=true svc:/application/database/sun-mysql50:default> exit # svcadm refresh sun-mysql50 # svcadm disable sun-mysql50 # svcadm enable sun-mysql50 # ps -ef | grep mysql mysql 649 490 0 14:00:06 ? 0:00 /bin/sh /opt/webstack/mysql/5.0/bin/64/mysqld_safe --user=mysql --datadir=/var/ mysql 747 649 0 14:00:06 ? 0:22 /opt/webstack/mysql/5.0/bin/64/mysqld --basedir=/opt/webstack/mysql/5.0 --datad
And as we can see from the process list, the 64 bit binary has been launched instead of the 32 bit one.
Add comment January 29th, 2009
Compiling Python 2.6 on Solaris 10
Sorry for not posting so much lately. Work has been busier than ever - it’s quite incredible. Just a quick post on compiling Python 2.6, which was giving me a few problems.
Dependencies
I’d recommend throwing on ncurses and readline from the Solaris 10 companion CD, the packages are SFWncur and SFWrline. The full dependency list is:
P SFWncur P SFWrline P SUNWbzip P SUNWcry P SUNWcsl P SUNWcslr P SUNWcsr P SUNWgccruntime P SUNWlibms P SUNWlibmsr P SUNWopenssl-libraries P SUNWzlib
Compiling
The _ctype module fails to compile with Sun Studio 12. Rather than fix this, I simply used gcc instead. Also Python seemed to be missing _ssl, so I popped in the appropriate library paths. Thus:
export "LDFLAGS=-L/opt/sfw/lib -R/opt/sfw/lib -L/usr/sfw/lib -R/usr/sfw/lib" export "CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/sfw/include -I/opt/sfw/include -I/opt/sfw/include/ncurses" export "CFLAGS=-I/opt/sfw/include" export "LIBS=-lncurses" export CC=gcc CXX=g++ ./configure --prefix=/opt/python26 --enable-shared --disable-ipv6 --with-threads --with-libs="-lncurses" --with-wctype-functions gmake gmake install
Not all the modules will compile, but the ones that were missing were not of importance (sqlite, bsdbd, etc).
1 comment January 27th, 2009
Rules and Resolutions of 2009
As an earthly mortal human, I have an obligation to make the most of my short life here in the universe. Being born, here & now, in the free modern world, during what is arguably our civilizations peak, is one of the greatest miracles of luck imaginable. Squandering my life, or shortening it, would be incredibly foolish. So without further ado, here is my list of new years resolutions with this in mind.
The Eco Warrior
Recycling.
I like to recycle, and am the only person in our office who relentlessly separates out the trash into recyclables and non-recyclables. However the cleaner often comes and empties our makeshift recycling bins into the regular trash, and my work colleagues simply do not separate their waste. Whilst I can encourage them to recycle more, they simply won’t do it unless it’s incredibly easy (my work colleagues are very busy people). Thus I hearby decree I will have the business purchase office recycling bins.
Cycling.
I cycled into work for a few weeks towards the end of summer, and it was good. I even bought designer handle bars for my bike to make it look prettier. However when the weather got bad, the cycling ceased. What’s worse, I replaced it with driving a Honda Civic Type-S 2.0 Litre gas guzzler into work. Every single day. And you know what else is worse? I constantly forgot to pay the congestion charge, racking up over £600 in fines over the past 12 months. This is bad. Very bad.
Well while I purchased a Ken Buster just before Christmas to protect me from getting any more Congestion Charge fines (Which mysteriously hasn’t been delivered yet), I must stop driving everywhere. I hereby decree I will purchase winter cycling gear! Warm gloves, thermal technical clothing, and some kind of hat for keeping my ears warm. I have also negotiated permission to leave my bicycle in the front room of our house, instead of having to retrieve it from the shed each time I wish to use it.
I also must learn to cycle slowly. I am alarmingly competitive, and on the bike would try to beat my time into work each day, often resulting in the occasional sugar crash, wobbly legs or sick-for-the-whole-morning feelings. Bad Alasdair.
And I must also commit to taking the train on days it’s too terrible to cycle in. Why oh why can’t the overground railways implement Oyster Prepay for us ad-hoc travellers! *shakes fists*
Improve Health
Eat. I am notoriously bad for skipping meals, in particular breakfast, due to laziness and bad habits. I am also terrible for replacing meals with cupboard food, normally in the form of chocolate and biscuits! This morning is a classic example - wake up, turn on laptop, oh! Box of after eights left over from xmas, what a delicious brekfast substitute *nom nom nom*.
I therefore hereby decree I will do my very little best to eat a proper breakfast each day. I will also order fewer take aways, cook more, learn to cook more meals (I quite enjoy cooking when I can find the time to unplug (see below)).
I also decree I will dramatically cut my intake of sweets and delicious carbonated beverages.
Sleep (less). I am exceptionally bad at getting up. I love sleeping. Mmmm sleep. Just thinking about it makes me sleepy. But you know what? Sleeping so god damn much makes me lethargic, ineffective, late for work, and results in me wasting vast quantities of valuable life.
A classic example is getting up at 2pm on Saturday and Sunday, then spending the day doing very little, followed by rushing to the supermarket before it closes on Sunday at 4pm. I then struggle to get to bed on time, fail to get into work on time on Monday, and generally start the week off on a bad foot. BAD. MUST NOT DO THIS ANY LONGER.
Exercise. I do believe I covered this off above under "Cycling".
Personal Improvement
Me, circa 5+ years ago!
Times have changed.
Appearance. I am a busy person (and a lazy one). As such my hair often grows past it’s cut by date, and my wardrobe is full of clothes I don’t like and don’t wear. I can be seen wearing the same pair of jeans 7 days a week. I occasionally let my designer stubble turn into a hobo beard. It has also been so long since I put product in my hair that I no longer posses the skills required to style it. Recent experiments in this area were an unmitigated embarrassing disaster.
I refuse to give in and become an unfashionable, unpresentable sandle wearing hippie. I resolve to stylise myself into a fashionable presentable person. Anyone care to take me shopping?
Socialising. My years of getting smashed, clubbing till 9am, depriving myself of sleep and vomiting on night busses are officially behind me. However I’m not going to let that stop me socialising. I resolve to go to the pub, attend more dinner parties, go to more social events, go to the cinema, museums, and generally attend the plethora of entertainment activities available.
Become More.
Learning. 2008 was a great year of learning. I think I learned more in 2008 than I did in the 3 years preceding it, especially with regards to work. We’ve gone from being a Linux focused company, to being a Solaris focused company. We’ve got many exciting projects underway involving the latest in breakthrough technologies. 2009 is going to be an exciting year ahead, and I need to keep on top of things and spend much time learning.
Contributing. In 2008, I can’t really say I contributed terribly much back to society. In 2009, I want to change that. I want EveryCity to be at the forefront of community activity, particularly with regards to Solaris. There’s a lot of knowledge we have internally about Solaris that may benefit others, and packages we use that would benefit the community.
I also fully intend to write a book on Solaris Administration. When I got started in Solaris, there were no good books on Amazon on the topic. They were all out of date or utterly irrelevant. I aim to change this. I’m hoping I can write something of the sort of quality that O’Reilly would be interested in publishing. We’ll see how much spare time I have!
UNPLUG
Lastly, in 2009 I need to unplug more. 2008 was a hectic year for me - I don’t believe I’ve ever been busier. Being so busy is alarmingly stressful, and I have noticed a few grey hairs appearing! 2009 must be less stressful, more enjoyable, and more relaxing. I need to spend time at home relaxing rather than working. I need to delegate more to my staff, and I need to spend what time I do have off, not attached to a computer.
I hope everyone has had a good 2008, and I wish all the best for 2009 :)
5 comments December 30th, 2008
Sun Web Stack 1.4 released for Solaris 10, RedHat RHEL5
Jyri Virkki has announced the release of Sun Web Stack 1.4 which you can download here. You can also get involved via their forum and read the lovely wiki based documentation.
It includes the following package sets, and what looks like MySQL 5.0 rather than 5.1 (sensible move given the poor reception of 5.1!):
|-----------------------------------------------| |Command line | Corresponding Package | |-----------------------------------------------| | amp | mysql5, php52, php+,apache-amp | |-----------------------------------------------| | apache | apache22, apache+ | |-----------------------------------------------| | mysql | mysql50 | |-----------------------------------------------| | php | php52, php+ | |-----------------------------------------------| | squid | squid | |-----------------------------------------------| | lighttpd | lighttpd14 | |-----------------------------------------------| | memcached | memcached | |-----------------------------------------------| | python | python25 (Solaris only) | |-----------------------------------------------| | ruby | ruby18 (Solaris only) | |-----------------------------------------------| | tomcat | tomcat5 | |-----------------------------------------------|
It was only just released and I haven’t yet tried it, but this appears to replace Sun Coolstack 1.3.1 and will be the new format moving forward. I will no doubt have to post new blog entries on compiling mcrypt for it!
Add comment December 23rd, 2008
SolarisBeat: iSCSI, Zone resource limits, a nicer whois, dd, tail and head.
A brief post with some links to resources I found useful these past few days…
iSCSI Tutorial
A very brief, to the point iSCSI how-to for Solaris.
Solaris Zone Resource Limits
A great, to the point guide to Solaris Zone resource limits.
A Nicer Whois
The standard Solaris whois is not very good - it doesn’t know how to lookup IP addresses, nor some of the newer TLDs. Fear not though - we can grab the latest GNUish Whois and compile it up ourselves.
GNU coreutils on Solaris
On Solaris, the “dd” command doesn’t output any statistics. I frequently use dd to test the speed of transfers and the Solaris one is no good for this. I also get frustrated by the syntax of the Solaris tail/head commands, and want to type the more sane “tail -f -n 50 somefile” command.
Well, thankfully we can just compile up the GNU coreutils package and steal the dd, tail and head commands. They work fine on Solaris. Most of cureutils isn’t needed however - why you’d want the GNU/Linuxesque uname, chmod, etc I have no idea. So I don’t bother with “make install”, and just copy out the tools I want.
Unfortunately coreutils-6.12 doesn’t compile on Solaris as it’s too new. I tried version 6.6 from November 2006, which worked fine!
Add comment December 10th, 2008
Flashing LSI SAS HBA Raid Cards on Sun Fire servers
We have a fair bunch of Sun Fire x2100, x2200 and x2250 servers, all of which we slap LSI SAS HBA cards (LSISAS3041E-R) in (Sun part code SG-XPCIE4SAS3-Z or "4 port SAS PCIE Internal HBA B3"). They’re not the best RAID cards out there (Management software is exceptionally poor), but they’re fast and well supported by Solaris, Linux and Windows. Periodically LSI release Firmware/BIOS updates for the cards, and believe me - if you care about your data, install the firmware updates.
Unfortunately it’s not made easy for you. You need to use something called a "DOS Boot Disk" After doing some research, I learned that DOS was the operating system used on early PCs based on the 8086 chip back in 1981. It was distributed on something called a "floppy disk" - a piece of hardware I can only assume computers of the era shipped with. Unfortunately in this modern day age, computers no longer have them. This makes updating the LSI card quite tricky to say the least.
Fret not however! There are methods of getting by without the required floppy disk drive.
DrDos, UltraISO and Nero Burning Rom
Download this humble DrDos image. Unzip. Obtain and install the trial version of UltraISO. Open UltraISO. Select "Open" from the "File" menu, and open the unzipped drdosmin.img file. Select "Change Image Format" from the "Actions" menu. Choose 2.88MB, select a location to save the file, and save.
Download the latest firmware files for your LSI raid card. Unzip. Drag the files into the UltraISO window, which should add the files to the image. Save.
Using your favourite CD Burning software, create a new "Bootable CD". In Nero you select "New Compilation" from the "File" menu, then select "CD-ROM (Boot)". From the "Boot" tab, select the Image file you created above with the firmware files on. Tick "Enable Expert Settings", and choose "Floppy Emulation 2.88MB". Burn to an ISO image by choosing the "Image Recorder" via "Choose Recorder" from the "Recorder Menu". (Note older Nero versions don’t support burning to anything other than Nero’s native image format which is no good - you’ll probably have to burn an actual CD)
iLOM, Beautiful iLOM
Head into your iLOM, mount the ISO you created, reboot, set the boot order if needed, and boot up your lovely ISO. You should be met with this:
Type "hbaflash" and hit return. Say no to the question asking you if you want to save a copy of your bios - saving to a read only CD-Rom won’t work. It is a good idea to save the old version, but sadly it’s not possible with this method.
Answer the on-screen questions. Be very very careful - giving the wrong answers may lead to your RAID card ceasing to function and/or bursting into flames. The main one to get right is the "Which Chip Version?" question. The answer is actually above under the "Ctrl" column - mine reads 1064E(B3), therefore it’s the B3 chip.
Once answering the questions, congratulations - your raid card will now be slightly less (or more, depending on how buggy the new bios release is) likely to frag your data.
Add comment December 8th, 2008
Solaris 10: Swap Space, /tmp and SMF
fork: Not enough space
Solaris 10 by default places /tmp on swap. This is good for speed, but not so good on a general purpose box where some applications may fill up /tmp. If you fill /tmp, you essentially reduce the amount of available swap to 0. This can lead to trouble, run out of physical ram, and new processes may not start. You get lovely fork() errors on the shell, and interesting messages in dmesg:
# ps -ef -bash: fork: Not enough space # free -bash: fork: Not enough space # prstat -bash: fork: Not enough space ... # dmesg ... Dec 7 02:56:27 w01.someserver.everycity.co.uk genunix: [ID 470503 kern.warning] WARNING: Sorry, no swap space to grow stack for pid 8193 (munin-node) Dec 7 02:56:51 w01. someserver.everycity.co.uk tmpfs: [ID 518458 kern.warning] WARNING: /tmp: File system full, swap space limit exceeded Dec 7 02:56:57 w01. someserver.everycity.co.uk genunix: [ID 470503 kern.warning] WARNING: Sorry, no swap space to grow stack for pid 8223 (exim) Dec 7 02:57:26 w01. someserver.everycity.co.uk genunix: [ID 470503 kern.warning] WARNING: Sorry, no swap space to grow stack for pid 563 (httpd) ...
The easiest way to fix this is to immediately disable any services that eat ram using svcadm disable, and clear out /tmp. You can then either move /tmp to a physical partition by editing /etc/vfstab, increase the amount of swap, or my favourite, limit the amount of swap /tmp can use by adding a mount option to /etc/vfstab:
# grep /tmp /etc/vfstab swap - /tmp tmpfs - yes SIZE=2048M
Unfortunately with this you have to reboot the box, which wasn’t an option with the machine I was running on. So I added a bunch more swap for the time being.
SMF Unhappy after running out of swap space
However I encountered a rather bizarre issue, which can only be described as a bug. Services I had stopped using svcadm disable, wouldn’t re-enable with svcadm enable:
# svcs http STATE STIME FMRI disabled 23:26:00 svc:/network/http:apache22-csk # svcadm -v enable http svc:/network/http:apache22-csk enabled. # svcs http STATE STIME FMRI disabled 23:26:00 svc:/network/http:apache22-csk
What’s going on here? The log in /var/svc/log didn’t report the enable command either. After investigating, I came to the conclusion that SMF must have broken when the box ran out of memory. SMF is managed by two processes, svc.startd and svc.configd, and thankfully you can restart them. Simply kill them both:
# ps -ef | grep svc
root 7 1 0 Dec 01 ? 0:01 /lib/svc/bin/svc.startd
root 9 1 0 Dec 01 ? 0:00 /lib/svc/bin/svc.configd
# pkill -9 svc.configd
# pkill -9 svc.startd
# ps -ef | grep svc
root 12803 1 0 23:47:07 ? 0:01 /lib/svc/bin/svc.configd
root 12841 1 0 23:47:09 ? 0:00 /lib/svc/bin/svc.startd
Then enabling the process actually does it this time:
# svcs http STATE STIME FMRI disabled 23:26:00 svc:/network/http:apache22-csk # svcadm -v enable http svc:/network/http:apache22-csk enabled. # svcs http STATE STIME FMRI enabled 23:49:00 svc:/network/http:apache22-csk
Problem solved! However I dislike it when things silently break in this way. You have to wonder, if SMF broke, what else may be having issues?
Add comment December 8th, 2008