SLES, ZendOptimizer and IBM PowerPC(4)+
Posted on Tuesday, 10th July, 2007 in Life
What would you figure from the above ? Hopefully the rather obvious, that it’s a *really* shitty combination.
So we figured it would be a nice thing to test our new setup before going into pre-production testing or production, but we don’t have an extra spare box. So we took one of the power4 boxes we have mounted in the rack basically consuming energy all day (that’s about 38kWh a day) and installed SLES10 onto it. Which wasn’t all that bad (at first the box repeatedly started back to AIX, from CD and after convincing the SMS - that’s basically the bios on the power*-boxes also known as System Management Services with a hammer to boot from the first hard disk).
The real bad part started later. First the box committed suicide sometime on the weekend (the last one that is), which is rather not so good.
So we installed the ocfs2-tools (which is obviously needed if you want do writes on a SAN volume mounted on two separate boxes), configured the o2cb thing to start automatically on boot and added the entry to /etc/fstab.
So far so good, but as we slowly activated the apache-vhosts, we finally came to what cost me about three damned hours of my life:
child pid ### exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
Now guess what … ZendOptimizer just went bye-bye … Damn and what now ? So I looked at the Knowledgebase on zend.com, even found an Article stating it’d do that from time to time …
And attached also the usual crap .. “Please update to the latest version”. Only problem with that is that the latest version is indeed available for x86_64 (meaning amd64 in Gentoo terms), but ain’t for ppc (even if the product page states it should be).
So I went home, knowing what the problem is - since it was already past 4pm - swearing a short “frack that“.
Now that I’m home, ate something (a rather good salad), listening to some Korn/Kid Rock/Offspring and after doing some undertakers work, I asked myself “Why exactly do we need that crappy application anyway ?” (beyond the obvious point, that the ZendOptimizer is like/ is a php-compiler cache).
It turns out, one of my co-workers wrote a TYPO3-plugin interfacing our local research database .. and the catchy thing is, guess what …
He “guarded” it with ZendGuard, thus we need to use the ZendOptimizer thingy; otherwise we couldn’t use it either … 
O RLY ?
AIX 5.3 Linux Toolkit
Posted on Wednesday, 7th February, 2007 in Life
OK, so I skipped rebuilding a newer RPM version (for now) and I’m currently rebuilding anything that fit’s into app-dev according to IBM …
The list reads like this:
$ ls -al ~/app-dev
autoconf-2.59-1.aix5.1.noarch.rpm
automake-1.8.5-1.aix5.1.noarch.rpm
binutils-2.14-3.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
bison-1.875-3.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
coreutils-5.2.1-2.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
cpio-2.5-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
diffutils-2.8.1-1.aix4.3.ppc.rpm
flex-2.5.4a-6.aix4.3.ppc.rpm
gawk-3.1.3-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
gcc-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
gcc-cplusplus-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
gdb-6.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libgcc-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libstdcplusplus-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libstdcplusplus-devel-4.0.0-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
libtool-1.5.8-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
m4-1.4.1-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
make-3.80-1.aix5.1.ppc.rpm
OK, I’m not exactly rebuilding these old versions, I’m actually using their old specs to compile newer versions of these. I’m currently at coreutils-6.7, which really takes ages. But will see about the rest.
Oh, and btw .. if anyone happens to search for a way to extend a logical volume on AIX, use chfs.
$ chfs -a size=+4 /opt
That’s what I used to enlarge the logical volume containing /opt about 4 (what kind of unit is that ?).
AIX-5.3 & rpm-4.4.7
Posted on Monday, 5th February, 2007 in Life
OK, so I tried to install the AIX Toolkit today, to build some newer rpm’s (yaaaaah, I *hate* RPMS myself, still it’s way better than distributing plain tar.gz archives) but looks like either AIX or rpm-4.4.7 doesn’t like me.
Now I’ve to figure out how to get libm (that’s /lib/libm.so) installed on AIX. Will see about that later and/or tomorrow.