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.

 
I guess saying "it's been a while" would be an understatement. I am sorry blog, I have ignored you for so long. I guess part of it was I have been busy but I think most of it was that I ran out of fun things to say. Most of what I do for work (unix conformance) is not very exciting to anyone but the handful of us that do. My main source of fun topics was my husband, who was working as a Solaris (and Linux) sysadmin for a university. Now he has moved to a new position focused strictly on email and not as general sysadmin, so his stories are less related to Solaris and not nearly as fun. (Though he did notice the big drop in spam this week as McColo was taken offline, that was pretty interesting.)
 
I finally will have some interesting stories of my own to relate. I have joined the board of directors for a non-profit as the technical director for the organization. No, I am still doing my day job. I guess this would count as a glorified hobby since it is all volunteer time. This hobby is going to allow me to completely design and direct the development of a new infrastructure for our organization of 29,000 members, 109 different local sites (with their own associated web forums), and 400,000 page hits a day to the web server (and everything growing fast). I've convinced them to take the plunge and we're moving to OpenSolaris for the entire network. I will finally get to use in a production environment all the cool tools I've barely been able to make use of, and many I've only just gotten to read about.
 
Step one is to migrate the existing set up from Ubuntu to OpenSolaris, and to new hardware in a new co-location facility. On paper, it seems like it should not be too difficult. All the key apps (apache, mysql, postfix, and phpbb) and their configuration work under Solaris. But, I know how migrations go and I am sure some adventures are in store for me.
 
So, hold on to your hats and glasses... things are likely to get interesting from here on out!

While I was on vacation last week, the following email was sent to the OpenSolaris discuss alias (posted here with permission of the author):

Subject: Solaris "thinks" that my standalone desktop is a huge network....

By "standalone" I mean a computer that is not part of a LAN, not even on a peer-peer connection, but one that gets on to the Internet.

I have a desktop with Sun Solaris and I have this problem. Solaris thinks that my standalone desktop is a huge network with a thousand users or more. I need to figure out a way of making Solaris understand that I am the only person using this compuer which is all alone, by itself.

I name is Shiva, and I want to tell my computer that it is my computer. It is ok for me if it allows another person called "root" who I figure out is a someone who is knowledgeable enough to get down to the root of the computer, it is not going to be me, it would be the support professional who would at some point of time visit me to look into my computer. But who is nobody? who is nouser? who is guest? What are groups? Why does Solaris say that I don't have the rights and privileges to access my DVD drive?

Why does Solaris wait for the root user to log in to shut down my computer ? I can log out as Shiva, but I don't see the controls to shut down. So, I phone up support to come in and log in as root and shut down my machine every afternoon, evening and at night and in the middle of the night.

And Solaris doesn't say yes immediately. It agrees to shut down, not until allowing 60 seconds to all other users who do not exist, after it sends out a "broadcast" announcing the "system" shut down, while I wait with my eyes fixed on the monitor on the messages that flash by in commnad prompt which I can't figure out, until Solaris finally shuts down...

Solaris thinks that my computer is a huge network, so offers me plenty of functalities that I am not going to need nor understand.

Solairs is elaborate, very elaborate and robust, but my computer stands alone. What do I need to tell Solaris to offer me just what I need and no more ?

What components are needed and what need to be stripped ? If my computer is a standalone ?

When I saw the subject, I was thinking, what the heck is this person talking about? When I read it, I was just dying with laughter. I was just amazed. It was so funny, and so right on. This is probably one of the best emails I have seen on that alias in months. I was sitting next to my husband and just going on about how great this email is. Really, it should be on the approachability alias. It just perfectly encapsulates some of the key issues with Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Then, I read the replies. Oh man, I could not believe it. WOOSH! That was the sound of this email going right over their heads. Not just a few people, no, *every* one of them just did not get it. I was thinking, oh no way, how could they take this email seriously?? People were trying to "educate" the imaginary Shiva on what root is and how they hoped there was some competent admin there running his system for him. Some were angry that Shiva was not interested in learning how to be a Solaris expert but just wanted to use his machine like a dumb Windows box. It was just sad really.

Come on! Would anyone who knows that little about unix and/or linux be on the OpenSolaris discuss alias?

Is it any wonder that OpenSolaris and Solaris aren't your mother's unixes? Nope, because we don't get it. We write code that makes it do what we, the unix geeks, want. We have no clue what many of our customers want. We want to expand our market share. How many geeks like us do we think are out there? We have no prayer of breaking into Windows' market share, or make a significant dent in OS X, because most of the people using computers out there are like Shiva, not like us. OS X has proven you can be UNIX and still be totally functional for all the Shivas out there. My parents both use OS X. They couldn't tell you how to get a command prompt or what root is but they can make their computers do everything they need them to. They can get them to do more than I can get my Solaris 10 desktop (working as a desktop, not a server) to do, and I am supposed to be an expert.

All the folks on OpenSolaris discuss wanted to do was just make Shiva go away. They wanted to tell him why he was wrong (or uneducated, or both), Solaris was right, and "teach" him how to use his computer our way. Don't get me wrong here. Solaris is great. If I was setting up a server, I wouldn't choose anything else. It is absolutely the best OS for that market. As a desktop, it is not there and it never will be until we get it.

Maybe we need to take a few refreshers on requirements gathering (and also on HCI).