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.