Opensource software for Solaris

Introduction

The setup is based on http://www.blastwave.org/. Consider the setup in CS to be BETA. We have setup at core.cs:/opt/csw/ which is on the netapp and consequently is backed up. An automount setup has been put in place on other hosts.

Conflicts with Xhier

Note that this collection of software has a version of tset that's incompatible with the version distributed by xhier, and therefore will break peoples' login scripts if csw comes first in one's PATH. (Possible Fix. Use xh-ln to link in xhier version. To ensure that running pkg-get upgrade would not clobber this link would entail writing a cover for pkg-get in the same way that there already exists a cover for apt-get in the xhier package debian-1 that uninstalls xhier redirects prior to updating CSW packages)

Automount Setup

To the automount setup. Setup a mount point:

• mkdir -p /autofs/software
• ln -s /autofs/software/csw /opt/csw

Set up the automount maps in /etc/auto_master:

# New open source software directory
/autofs/software        auto_software

Create /etc/auto_software:

# csw tree is the opensource software we're getting from
# http://www.blastwave.org/. We do the install of the software
# on core.cs using /opt/csw/bin/pkg-get which installs it on the
# fs102.cs file server. The backup host then rsync's fs102.cs to
# fs02.student.cs file server that night.
#
csw -ro,soft,intr,nosuid,vers=3 fs-software.cs.uwaterloo.ca:/software/csw fs-software.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca(5):/vol/software/csw

Solaris 8:

Ensure /etc/init.d/autofs is present (along with /etc/rc{0,1,S}.d/K41autofs and /etc/rc2.d/S74autofs.

Run /etc/init.d/autofs start. Maybe consider putting /opt/csw/bin last in your PATH, but note that some xhier packages may conflict so watch out for that.

Some packages install startup scripts into /etc/init.d/ and /etc/rc?.d/ which are directories local to a given host. It's not clear where the post install script are located for a given package since these are need to install on the automount client hosts. Note that /var/sadm/ is where Sun's packaging tools store state information and they do have some scripts in here under /var/sadm/pkg//install. For example,

/var/sadm/pkg/CSWcupsd/install/.:
total 112
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     other        512 Oct 24 13:05 .
drwxr-xr-x   4 root     other        512 Oct 24 13:05 ..
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        390 Sep  8 13:17 checkinstall
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other      48724 Sep  8 13:21 copyright
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        378 Sep  8 13:17 depend
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        150 Sep  8 13:17 postremove
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other       1044 Sep  8 13:17 preremove
-rw-r--r--   1 root     other        192 Sep  8 13:17 space

Solaris 10

• Check for an existing automount daemon:
  • ps -ef | grep automountd

• restart it:
  • svcadm restart svc:/system/filesystem/autofs

Accessing /opt/csw software

To access the software, users will need to add /opt/csw/bin to their PATH variable. Probably it's best to add it to the end, to avoid conflicts, mentioned above.

Updating the Software and Configuration

I have examined /opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf used by pkg-get. Clearly these tools are analogues of the Debian counterparts of /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get, respectively. According to http://www.blastwave.org/userguide there are two choices of repositories of packages, known, respectively as stable and unstable. To choose one or the other we do:

To select stable or unstable , set the url= entry in
/opt/csw/etc/pkg-get.conf to point to a mirror's unstable or stable
subdirectory.

I did one pkg-get upgrade to unstable and then edited the above file to say stable. I think if we intend to offer this to our users making it stable is appropriate.

For information on the uage of pkg-get, see man page and Howto.

To update CSW packages, logon to core.cs and run pkg-get -U and pkg-get upgrade. You may be prompted to remove older versions of packages. Provided they don't remove the configuration files associated to a package you should answer y.

See http://www.blastwave.org/standards/pkgcreation.php for some guidance on how the packages are organized.

Automount Setup is not sufficient for some packages

Some packages have daemons in them and thus install init scripts into /etc/init.d/ and /etc/rc?.d/ which are local to the host and so require that the package be installed locally. In particular CUPS.