To catch up on where we left off with my previous blog post... my server is now awol. Well, I have not lost track of it completely but I have no idea what is happening with it. [unhappy face] Amber was never able to figure out how to boot it off the CD. One of the other directors had a friend in the area who is a techie and she asked him to take a look at it. He met Amber to get the server, and that was the last I heard of it. Sigh. Some days I feel like we're never going to get that machine up and running. I do have a conference call with our new co-lo on Wednesday and I am hoping they can work with me to get this all resolved, assuming I can get the guy who has the server now to get it to them anytime.
 
Despite this setback, things are moving forward. We had a fundraiser to get the money to buy a new server. The server I have been trying to set up was donated by a friend and was supposed to get us off our current server to something that can sustain us right now. We need a new server in order to grow. Our members did an amazing job and we exceeded our goal so it looks like we'll be buying a new server soon.
 
To prepare for the move to OpenSolaris, we (my husband and I) installed 11.2008 on one of our home machines. Today I am trying to get the Web Stack up and running on OpenSolaris and get the configuration like what we have on the existing server. I am way too used to Solaris so of course I figured this would be really quick, just edit a few conf files and start it up. Nope... where is apache? Duh, it is not there, I need to add it.
 
Ok... time to read a little bit so I headed over opensolaris.com and clicked on the big "Use" icon -> Customize Your System. Perfect, what I want to do is the first thing listed. This is going to be quick and easy. Why do I let myself ever think that? As soon as I do, something always happens. Why do the instructions start with the software already on my computer? The first step is "extract the .tar.gz file...". What .tar.gz file? We seem to have missed at least one step here.
 
Grumble, do I need to do pkg install? What is the package name? That does not make sense with the instructions to extract a tar.gz file. I suppose I can see reasons why you do would want to have all the instructions on how to download it in the install & config guide... but this is html, would it be so hard to put a single line with a link to those instructions just in case people missed them? I never found anyplace that tells you what you need to do and ended up asking my husband what I needed to get. What would I do without him around?
 
A "pkg install amp" later and I have apache and friends. Let's try starting it... scvadm enable and hmm... it is in maintenance mode. You would think the -v (for verbose) option to svcadm might actually help you figure this out, but I guess verbose is one line saying "svc:network/http:apache22 enabled" to some engineer out there. Except it wasn't enabled, so that was pretty much useless as well as not being verbose. So I try scvs -x and see EXIT_ERR_FATAL. Ew, no fun. Maybe a log file? You might try looking in /var/log/apache2 like I did, but nope. The directory exists, but it is empty (of course, because otherwise it wouldn't fit with my day thus far). Alright, read the httpd.conf file. Well at least I did find the error log. Hmm... why can't it figure out its own IP address? I ask the oracle of everything I do not know, my husband, and he suggests dhcp might be the reason. I pray that is not it because that is just stupid. If my 6 year old Mac laptop can do it, then OpenSolaris better be able to.
 
Is 2pm too early to start drinking because I need one about now?
 
It is a good thing I have to stop now to get the kids from school... because when you start yelling at the computer, you know it is time to take a little break.

 
The goal was to get the server to the new co-lo by the end of November. We missed it. A big part of that was the Thanksgiving holiday and pretty much losing all of last week. But, another part of it is that it is really hard to do tech support. I have never envied the job of a phone tech support person, and last night just reminded me how frustrating it can be.
 
The member of my tech team, we'll call her Amber, who has the server right now was going to install OpenSolaris on the machine yesterday. Right after dinner I got a message from her, did I have a few minutes? She kept getting a login prompt but she did not have a username/password. That is not right, there shouldn't be a login prompt yet, we have not installed anything. She is certain she told the machine to boot off the CD-ROM. A few questions later about what various screens look like, did she see a pretty blue screen with the word "OpenSolaris" on it anyplace, etc.? No. Grub menu? Yes. Ok, we're not booting off the CD, but we're getting Linux booting off the hard drive.
 
Reboot... darn it the screen flashes too fast... reboot... reboot... reboot, and then she finally gets enough of a view of the initial screens to get in to the bios. Have you ever tried to help someone use a BIOS page for a machine you've never used before? Ick. It is not fun. I do not have experience with many varieties of PC hardware and this server is a brand I know nothing about. We manage to establish that the CD-ROM is set in the 2nd position for boot order but after 2 hours and many reboots we cannot seem to get it changed so that the machine will boot from the CD. Amber is 3 hrs ahead in time so we had to abandon the efforts for the night so she could get some sleep.
 
So, tonight we'll try again.

 
I've been trying to come up with a good pseudonym for the organization that I am the technical director for so that I can talk about it here without confusing what I am writing with whatever I am doing in my real job for Sun. How about Unnamed Social Network Site... or USNS for short? I suppose it really does not matter and that is easy enough to type.
 
A friend of mine donated a spare 1U server to USNS recently. We are currently leasing a server with our co-lo and it is not meeting our needs anymore. The donated server is not "new", but it was free and it should meet our current workloads. Like most non-profits, we operate on a shoestring budget and not having to pay to lease a server every month, especially one that cannot handle peak usage, is a big improvement for us.
 
Step one for the migration from the old server to the new server (and from Ubuntu to OpenSolaris) is getting the new server ready to be taken to the co-lo. Since the co-lo is on the other side of the country and we have no remote console set up, I need the OS installed before the machine is delivered to them. One of the members of my technical team, who lives in the same area of the country as the co-lo, will be doing this for me and then delivering the machine. It will be a great test of all the changes that have been made to the download and install process for OpenSolaris. I think the process is really easy, but I've been working with Solaris for a long time. Will someone with no Solaris/OpenSolaris experience see it the same way? I am about to find out. If all goes well, we'll have the new server online by the end of the month.