Slony doesn’t compile out of the box on a Solaris 10/OpenSolaris 2008.5 box. Quite frustrating! Even with everything installed, it can’t find libpgport.a. I tried hunting through Google, but had no joy - but I did fix it!

Assuming you’re using Postgres 8.2.9 (that’s the latest shipping version in Solaris 10/OpenSolaris):

1. Grab the source code for Postgres
2. Make sure Coolstack 1.3 is installed (or some other copy of readline)
3. Make sure /opt/coolstack/lib is in your crle path
4. Make sure you have sunstudio or sunstudioexpress installed and in the path

5. gtar xjf postgresql-8.2.9.tar.bz2

6. cd postgresql-8.2.9

7. CC=cc CXX=CC ./configure --prefix=/opt/postgres \

   --with-libs=/opt/coolstack/lib \

   --with-include=/opt/coolstack/include

8. cd src/port

9. gmake

10. cp *.a /usr/postgres/8.2/lib

Now you’ll be able to make Slony. I’m not saying this is the right way, but it certainly worked for me and I now have it up and running just fine.

So Apple’s UK advert for ‘All parts of the Internet’ on the iPhone has been banned. It’s taken them long enough, the advert was for the old 2G phone, not the new one. It’s also well over 6 months old.

Included here for viewing pleasure:

I was getting this a lot in ESXi 3.5 with OpenSolaris snv_95. Until I spotted a useful snippet on the OpenSolaris forums.

I thought, what the hell. I ssh’d into the ‘host’ (you need to enable it, instructions can be found here) and then went to the vm’s directory in vmfs and deleted the .nvram file. Then started up the VM again and the problem was all gone! Woohoo! No more 1986 vm. Now if only the other problems with performance could be sorted.

This morning I updated to 2.0.2 of the iPhone firmware (I have an original iPhone). My phone is unlocked to Vodafone using Pwnage - I won’t provide links to all that stuff here. Problem was, I put the phone into recovery mode, restored my new custom 2.0.2 firmware and iTunes went "Do you want to restore xyz backup?" Yes! This is what I usually do and it works every time.

Anyhow, it restored as normal and rebooted the phone. Only iTunes still saw it as a new phone! That’s not right at all! Anyway a quick Google dug up this thread with details on how to fix it. Appears it’s a common 2.0.2 problem then.

1. Click set up as new iPhone and hit Continue
2. As soon as it starts - CANCEL IT on the iPhone. Then cancel it on iTunes as well
3. Unplug phone
4. Turn off by holding the top button down then ‘Slide to turn off’
5. Turn on the phone by pressing the top button again
6. Once fully booted, plug in phone

And then it all shall work well again.

Cool, I’ve got my VM up and running with OpenSolaris 2008.05 @ snv_95 in ESXi 3.5 U2 on my nice new server.

Now - to add more disks. I wanted to add 3 new hard disks to use RAID-Z. Obviously I would be using 3 physically seperate disks, but make vmdk’s on each of them. I wanted to do this without rebooting at all, and manged it. Here’s how:

1. Create new DataStores in the VMware Infrastructure Manager.
2. Add 3 new virtual hard disks to the VM, making sure they are all the same size but on 3 different data stores.
3. Apply the changes
4. SSH into the VM (or use the console… SSH is better)

5. pfexec devfsadm -c disk

6. pfexec zpool create <name here> raidz c4t1d0p0 c4t2d0p0 c4t3d0p0

Obviously device nodes might be different, those were what they were for me. Was very nice to be able to do this with zero downtime on the server itself.

Step 5 forces Solaris to reload the /dev structure in relation to disks. Means all the new /dev/rdsk and /dev/dsk nodes are created without the normal reboot. Step 6, obviously, is the creation of the zpool. Once you have that - go ahead and store lots of stuff!

So, yesterday I got myself one of these: HP Proliant ML115 G5 for a cool £109 inc. VAT! Bargain! Has a Dual-core AMD Opteron 1214, 512MB of RAM (which I popped in a £50 OCZ 4GB kit to get that up to a good level) and a 160GB SATA HDD.

Why? Well my old home server (which ran Solaris) popped it’s cloggs a couple of weeks ago and I wanted my desktop computer back!

It’s a nice little machine but has a few issues that people Googling and coming across this might like to hear solutions too:

1. VMware ESXi 3.5 Update 2 DOES work on this machine. You have to boot it off of a USB pendrive though. Thankfully there is a USB port on the motherboard inside the case! So you can embed a pendrive in there.
2. FreeBSD 7.0 RELEASE will NOT run. You have to get the latest STABLE snapshot CD (June ‘08 onwards) and it will then work.
3. OpenSolaris 2008.05 snv_86 will NOT boot. The only one that will is snv_95, and even then it won’t detect the network card. It’s expected to be all fixed in snv_97 if the bug reports are to believed (when that will appear, nobody knows).
4. Solaris 10u5 will NOT run on this machine either, for the same reasons as OpenSolaris.

Personally, I recommend the ESXi route - especially as Update 2 is finally fixed. Other than the fact that non-Windows OS’s have issues on this server, it’s a lovely quiet little box. I mean, almost silent - even with 4 SATA disks inside. The build quality is top notch. For the price, grab a couple and use them for testing out network virtualization setups… one idea I have is on as an iSCSI server and the other as a diskless ESXi. Maybe you could use 3 and test out VMotion

Yay! The new service pack for Visual Studio 2008 is available for download. Cool, so let’s go download it… Oh wait it says in the Release Notes that:

During installation of Visual Studio 2008 SP1, MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will not be installed on your computer.
       

To resolve this issue:

MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is available as a separate download. See
        Microsoft Download Center.

Cool - not only is the Download Center link incorrect… There is NO MSDN Library for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 download available. Good game.