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This Old SPARC

The story of a man and his Sun SPARCstations (and an Ultra), and the trials, tribulations, and victories that go with the care and feeding of such a menagerie.

Sunday, December 24, 2000

Wooho! I finally got Together installed on buzz today. A week or so ago, I was beaten down trying to complete the install, due to the fact that the Unix install of Together is GNU tar'ed, not Unix tar'ed. Since buzz doesn't have GNU tar, getting the install competed was not a simple task. Well, it was simple, in the end, but the route to the end was a twisted one. Following are the details.

Trying to get the GNU tar binaries
I guess GNU tar is used by companies distributing Unix packages, because it is a rough standard, and is freely available for compilation on many platforms. Well, I didn't really want to compile GNU tar just to install Together, so I went looking around for binaries. I first tried www.sunfreeware.com. It has the GNU tar binaries, but in two tries, I just couldn't get a good download. Plus, the download was very slow at this site. Thus defeated, I today moved on to another Solaris freeware site, called www.freeware4solaris.com. This site offers GNU tar in PKG format, which is great, because installing from a package results in a "tracked" install, meaning that a record of the installation is made, and the package can be easily uninstalled later. However, running 'pkgadd -d' on the downloaded package resulted in no joy. I got errors, something about a stream. Sigh.

Compiling GNU tar instead
Something got into me (it's called "desperation") and I decided that the only way I was going to get GNU tar was to compile it. Now, I'm a software developer, so this concept is no big deal to me. However, I've been doing Java for the last few years, and C/C++ was a very long time ago, and never on Unix. Therefore, my imagination had filled me with horrors of paths not found, compile errors, etc., etc., when it came to actually running a make on buzz. I couldn't have been more wrong! Since GNU stuff uses autoconf, compilation was a snap. Here are the steps I followed:

  • downloaded the source .tar (Unix tar, not GNU, for obvious reasons :-))
  • moved the .tar to my ~/work/src directory
  • untar'ed the file: tar xvf gnu-tar*
  • moved into the directory created by the untar
  • read the README file
  • ran ./configure, which queried my system and prepared config files for the make
  • ran make, which ran just fine (gcc, etc. comes with Solaris 8) -- no compiler errors!
  • ran make test to test the make -- no errors!
  • became root and ran make install, which also ran with no errors.
  • ran /usr/local/bin/tar and got the usage instructions -- Sweet!
Installing Together
I'd already attempted installation using Unix tar, but this only half worked. So, I stayed superuser and did the following:
  • switched to /opt and deleted the Together install directory that was created by the last untar attempt. The .tar file was still in /opt from last time.
  • ran /usr/local/bin/tar toge*, which successfully untar'ed everything. I watched in horror as /opt space melted away. Together is huge.
  • hacked around for a while on the Together.sh file in Together's bin directory. This is the startup file for Together, and needs to be fixed for a given installation.
  • switched back to my normal login and ran Together.sh. It loaded fine.
Here's a screenshot of Together running on Xwin-32 (highly recommended) on my wife's Windows desktop.


posted by Mike Thomas 12/24/2000 01:43:51 PM

Saturday, December 23, 2000

I finally did a bit of housecleaning on buzz today. I'd been downloading stuff and not really organizing the downloads, so I created a 'downloads' directory (strangely enough) and placed all the .tar and .gz files I've collected in there. Then I deleted a bunch of crap that was just sitting in my home directory, and moved the 'etc' directory from there to my 'work' directory, under which is also a 'src' directory.

Next, I turned my attention to the developer's copy of WebLogic server I installed a few days ago. It didn't start right up and run back when I installed it, and I didn't have the patience at the time to fix it, so I just left it there. Today, I did have the patience, so I fixed the install. All it took was two things: updating the weblogic.policy file for the installation directory and adding the system password to the weblogic.properties file. After that, voila it ran perfectly. I did hack the startup script a bit to run WLS under nohup and created a stop script (now, why don't they include one of those?).

I then installed "Ant", which is a nice Java-based build tool. Unlike 'make', it's multiplatform, so your builds work anywhere. We're using it at my current gig, so it makes sense for me to have it. I can now bring work home to the Ultra, which is kind of cool. Of course, I've been given a WinNT laptop to work on, but I'd rather work in luxury on my 20" monitor (even if it is crapping out), and full keyboard.

Speaking of WinNT, I've got to say that last week (my first on the new job) was a revelation to me. When I worked at Qwest, I pretty much did most of my development work either in Together (the world's best development tool) or at the Unix command line. Well, the environment at my new gig is basically WinNT with deployment to Unix (HP-UX) almost as an afterthought. I've been using Ant to automate our builds (or at least trying to), which you do at the command line. God, is the DOS command line crappy! Even though I used it a lot back in the 80's I never knew what I was missing until I spent a year and a half at a Unix command line. Not to mention the little differences that will drive you crazy, like "\" instead of "/", and "dir" instead of "ls".

The first thing I did to save my sanity was to create a '\batch' directory and put a few batch files in there, like ls.bat, cat.bat, etc. That helped, but still the little differences were killing me. Finally I gave up and started searching for a Unix shell for NT. I hit paydirt with UWin. It's by David Korn, so it's gotta be good, right? This baby has saved my sanity. Thanks, David!

The only hitch I've found so far is that Ant won't run under the UWin K shell for some strange reason. It's dirt simple to set it up under Solaris (I did it today in about ten minutes), but I keep getting ClassNotFound exceptions under the UWin shell. So I can't escape the DOS command line completely. I keep one around just to execute Ant. My development environment still works pretty well, all in all, though.
posted by Mike Thomas 12/23/2000 08:55:17 PM


This is why we run Un*xes, isn't it?:

##### # # ###### ###### # # # # # # ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # ##### #### ###### ###### 128 buzz: /export/home/thomasmi>uptime 8:36pm up 77 day(s), 12:09, 2 users, load average: 0.41, 0.18, 0.17
#### ##### ## ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # # # #### # # # # # # #### # # ##### ###### ##### # # # # # # # # # # # # # #### # # # # # # # # 157 sparky: /export/home/thomasmi>uptime 8:37pm up 82 day(s), 2:04, 3 users, load average: 0.06, 0.04, 0.04

posted by Mike Thomas 12/23/2000 08:39:04 PM

Tuesday, December 12, 2000

OK, the fact that my monitor is going south on me, and the high cost of buying a nice new one (as a singular purchase), have caused me to consider giving into the impulse to setup an Intel box running Linux as my "front-end" machine. The monitor is one reason. Another reason is the obvious mindshare given Linux and the lack thereof for Solaris. All the cool new software is being targeted to Linux, with the scaps going to Solaris and other OSes like BSD. For example, the Opera browser is great. I'd buy it in a heartbeat if there were a Solaris version. I've written Opera twice, and have received basically the same response "no plans to port to Solaris". So, I'm stuck with crappy old Netscape 4.75.

This is not to say that the Solaris/SPARC experiment has failed. On the contrary, my understanding of Unix/Solaris has increased tremendously since undertaking this experiment, and it should only increase, since I intend to keep the SPARC boxes as "back-end" servers. I'll likely use the SS10 (sparky) as the TomCat server and the Ultra 1 (buzz) as the database server. I have plans to convert this site (all of it) to be totally data-driven so that I can update it from anywhere. I'll have a kick-ass development and testing environment to do so once I've got all this set up. Furthermore, the code I develop will be open to the public. I don't know about a full open-source deal (only because of administrative overhead, not because I don't believe in OS) but the code will be available to everyone. This is all a dream right now. We'll see how real it gets :-).

Anyway, here's the basic config for the machine I intend to buy:

  • dual processor Intel box, probably around 600mhz on the processors
  • 256M of RAM
  • 32M graphics card
  • 20-30G hard drive
  • 19" high-quality monitor (when bought with a package these can be quite inexpensive)
I've configured a machine like this at www.pcsforeveryone.com for around $2200. I just have to wait for some revenues to start coming in from my consulting practice to make this purchase. This should happen in February of next year.

posted by Mike Thomas 12/12/2000 09:48:12 AM

Sunday, December 03, 2000

I got my monitor back from the shop with the news that it can't be fixed. What a bummer. I mean, it's useable as is, but very annoying that I can't take advantage of the full screen area because of this leftward shift. I'm keeping an eye on eBay auctions for replacement monitors. However, I won't buy a used (old) one again. There's a nice 21" there now, but the auction still has 7 days to go. No hurry to bid.
posted by Mike Thomas 12/3/2000 10:33:09 AM


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