Dear Readers,

Today Ian Murdock and Sun announced the release of OpenSolaris during the keynote speech for CommunityOne conference. I have been using this release along side Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris b87. I must say that it feels a lot more like Linux initially. After that initial shock I was able to realize that I still had the power and stability of the Solaris kernel at my fingertips as well as all the wonderful software that has been developed by Sun and all the communities involved. I will be setting up a three tiered system for a Ruby on Rails hosting framework including everything from the web hosting to the database and version control. This aims to be the most complete howto guide I have produced yet and I will release it on my blog as well as a styled PDF for those who like to print things out and take notes.

-Ron

Introduction

It is possible to reconfigure the system just as if it were a new install. This is possible when you add or change your hardware on the system.

On SPARC hardware you startup with

boot -r

On x86/64 hardware you edit your grub startup by pressing e when the prompt appears then e again when the multiboot kernel line is highlighted. Now you can edit your startup options. Append the following on the end of the line.

-r

Press return to save your edit and b to boot up that modified entry.

-Ron

Introduction

There are three major types of virtualization that are put into use almost every day in computing. Each of these make our lifes both easier and more painful. I will be talking about VMware and Xen because of them being the leaders in enterprise virtualization while also offering a free products to use.

The three main types of virtualization are:

• Full-Virtualization
• Paravirtualization
• Application Virtualization

Full Virtualization

Most of VMware products use the full-virtualization implementation because of its capability to completely isolate itself from the host machine.

IMPORTANT: This is not totally true, there is a great podcast from Paul Dot Com which explains the possibilities of breaking out of a guest virtual machine into the host machine

Paravirtualization

Xen on the other hand implements Paravirtualization which enables for a still secure but optimized interaction between the guest and the hardware. This is because the kernel used in the guest must be ported to implement the API calls to the Xen Kernel.

Application Virtualization

This virtualization occurs at the application layer. A great example of this type of virtualization is the Java Virtual Machine. There is a layer where the java applications interact with and the Java Virtual Machine actually handles the interation with the operating system itself.

Introduction

Nginx is a small webserver that has been built for speed and scalability. It is used for many large sites in Russia and is quite stable. I have been using this webserver for quite some time in a testing environment, I am very satisfied with its performance and memory footprint.

echo $PATH

mkdir -p /opt/local/src
cd /opt/local/src
wget ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk:21//pub/software/programming/pcre/pcre-7.3.tar.gz
gunzip pcre-7.3.tar.gz
tar -xf pcre-7.3.tar
cd pcre-7.3
./configure --prefix=/opt/local

./configure --with-pcre=/opt/local/src/pcre-7.3 \
            --prefix=/opt/local --user=webservd --guest=webservd

make
make install

Introduction

This guide will go through the installation process of building subversion from source on Solaris 10 machine. These instructions can be ported to almost any platform supported by subversion. Subversion is used in many development areas when losing progress and tracking changes is important. Which is basically all the time. That being said I use subversion for all my development projects because it is very efficient version control system, also it can be used over SSH without even setting up Web_DAV access or running the included svn server. Enjoy the post and by all means enjoy subversion. You will never look back.

wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.5.tar.bz2
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.5.tar.bz2

bunzip2 subversion-1.4.5.tar.bz2
tar -xf subversion-1.4.5.tar.bz2
bunzip2 subversion-deps-1.4.5.tar.bz2
tar -xf subversion-deps-1.4.5.tar.bz2

cd subversion-1.4.5
./configure --prefix=/opt/local --without-neon

make
make install