WPMU 2.7, Solaris packages, Splunk

…and I’ve got nothing to write about. Damn you cruel fate.

Anyway, yes, that means blogs.redbrick.dcu.ie is finally ready to go. Andrew Harford did most of the set up work, I just broke it, fixed it again, fixed the editor and upgraded it. And now it’s a fully functional WPMU 2.7 installation. The upgrade from 2.6 to 2.7 was surprisingly painless, MediaWiki should take note. This new control panel is extremely nice.

Currently trying to make redbrick’s packaging script for Solaris (rspm) build PHP 5. It keeps complaining that it can’t find libmysqlclient15 under /usr/local. Damn right you can’t find it, I told you to look under /usr/redbrick. Somewhat confused as to why the error is happening. The -L/usr/redbrick/mysql/lib line is there in the compile command that causes the error, as is -lmysqlclient15. I’m completely lost on this one. Can libraries have paths hard coded into them? It only happens when trying to link php-cgi.

Aside from random hiccups like this though, the packaging script seems to work well. It reads a packages.dat file that holds information such as dependencies of that package, the unique system name (e.g. RBphp5), where and how it should locate current version information and the source archive for that package, and how it should compile it. It then creates a chroot environment under /tmp, copies necessary files over to it, and begins the compile process. It’s worked so far for a number of packages (Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, GNU readline and gettext, etc). The update check command and updater process even works perfectly – the update check script has been hooked up to murphy’s nightly logwatch. It also supports things like pre-removal scripts, for example, to stop apache before it’s overwritten, and restart it afterwards. This is all working around the SVR4 package management system, which, while does what it does extremely well, doesn’t do much.

Also working on a Splunk installation. The current plan is to have it sitting on deathray. After LDAP is removed, we can put it behind an Apache httpd, and use Apache authentication with mod_proxy to get around the lack of user authentication in the free version. A recent (ish) license change means that the free version can now do proper forwarding and receiving, so we should be able to properly send all logs to be indexed. Then we just need to set up some custom searches and index rules, should make life quite a bit easier.

I was a little worried about performance, and the initial index did seem to annoy deathray a little bit (working through a backlog), but it’s happily indexing apache logs as they’re being produced at the moment, and load isn’t going above 0.2ish.

End post!