Coolstack

Technology

Solaris CoolStack, Sun Studio and Ruby

June 8, 2007 by 2 Comments

If you are using the Solaris CoolStack edition of Ruby (CSKruby) with Sun Studio 11 (SUNWspro) then you may need to make a small change to one of the Ruby configuration files to tell it where Sun Studio is installed. I would have have expected the installer for the Ruby package to detect this but, alas, it does not.

In my case, this problem will only manifested itself when I attempted to install some platform-specific Ruby Gems packages (hpricot, fastthreads, mongrel).
To remedy this problem:

  1. Edit the file /opt/coolstack/lib/ruby/1.8/sparc-solaris2.10/rbconfig.rb
  2. Search for all instances of SUNWspro and change to the correct location
  3. Save the file and repeat your “gem install” command
Technology

Building Loadable Modules for Apache on Solaris

May 2, 2007 by 8 Comments

We recently installed a version of Sun’s CoolStack software bundle on a SunFire T2000 server running Solaris 10 so that we could use its CoolThreads-optimised version of Apache instead of the regular Apache that came pre-installed on the box (highly recommended by Sun).

However, when we ran the new version of Apache against our configuration, we discovered that it does not include a number of key modules that we require (namely Proxy Balancer). Sun does not provide these in binary format so we had to build them by hand. Fortunately, Apache does provide a convenient tool (apxs) for building modules but unfortunately this requires you to install a Sun compiler, Sun Studio (now free though) which added some extra time to the process.

Anyway, I appreciate that this may not be rocket science to many of you but, despite the many articles already published on this topic, there were still some issues that we hit which were not documented. So, here is how we did it.

  1. Ensure that you have installed the latest version of the CoolStack software (installs to /opt/coolstack)
  2. Download, unpack and install Sun Studio 11 (installs to /opt/SUNWspro)
  3. Be patient, very patient … 600MB download, followed by a long unzip to 1.1GB followed by a long install …
  4. Download, unpack and install the CoolStack Source (installs to /opt/coolstack/src)
  5. Now, as a root user, follow the commands below

# export PATH=/opt/SUNWspro/bin:$PATH
# cd /opt/coolstack/src/httpd-2.2.3/modules/proxy
# /opt/coolstack/apache2/bin/apxs -i -a -c mod_proxy.c proxy_util.c

This will compile the module, copy it to the appropriate directory and update the Apache configuration file for you. If you leave out the proxy_util.c you will get "proxy_lb_worker: symbol not found" errors when you start Apache

# /opt/coolstack/apache2/bin/apxs -i -a -c mod_proxy_balancer.c

Once again, this will compile, copy and deploy the module for you

# /opt/coolstack/apache2/bin/apxs -i -a -c mod_proxy_http.c

If you forget to install this module, Apache will start, but the site will be inaccessible (saying you do not have permissions to view this page). You will also see errors like "proxy: No protocol handler was valid for the URL /" in the Apache error log file for your product.

Best of luck!