Have spent several days this week reengineering the digital infrastructure of our ILS system (Endeavor’s Voyager). In mid-August, we’ll be upgrading to their latest release (6.1) and beyond the usual disruptions these “annual” upgrades bring, this one spells the end of Solaris 8 for our web OPAC. That’s too bad—I can administer a Solaris 8 server in my sleep—but nothing good lasts forever, right? Endeavor’s new web gateway requires a vendor-compiled version of Apache 2.0.55 and a minimum of Solaris 9.
My first impulse was to pull an older E250 out of mothballs and install Solaris 9 (after all, it’s pretty much an incremental update). But then I realized that I could no longer easily obtain new drives for this machine—all the “state approved” vendors on my list show only refurbs. Since I want to get this system running and then not have to think about it for at least a couple of years, I decided to go ahead and make the jump to the very different Solaris 10 and put the gateway on a new, much faster V240 I’ve had sitting around the office for a few months. I found a set of Solaris 10 (3/05) disks and got ready for the installation. It was an odd moment—with a simple “boot cdrom” at the ‘ok’ prompt, I was about to become really stupid about Solaris again. Of course, after months of mousing and clicking all over Apple OS X Server preference panes, it’s kinda cool to geek out by installing software on a headless server using a DB-9 terminal connection to a PC that’s putting the cursor off by one line because of confusion about proper terminal emulation…
I won’t recount all the problems I ran into trying to bring the 3/05 installation to current patched status—it just never worked right but the reason for the quirky failures was never obvious either. For example, I found a document on SunSolve that addressed many of the problems I was seeing (Document 101688: Multiple Patching and Packaging Issues for Solaris 10) but some of the information there was incorrect. It suggested I install patch 121297 but it turns out that number referred to an x86 patch. As you might guess, the 121296 patch listed for x86 was actually the one I needed for a SPARC cpu. There were other problems, as well. After getting all sorts of install errors on the “Recommended and Security” cluster I finally gave up, downloaded a series of .iso images for the 6/06 release of Solaris 10, burned 5 CDs and did a clean install. I should have done that a lot sooner than I did—everything worked great. I think Sun made some fundamental improvements in Solaris between the 3/05 release and the most recent (6/06) version.
Other Moves
Thinking about moving my focus back to Solaris for a while reminds me there’s another move coming up soon. In September, we’ll be closing LSO West (here in the Johnson Center) and moving everything back to Fenwick (where we were until the mid-90’s). The little photo is a sneak preview of the future “Library Systems Office” that’s being carved out of a portion of the 3rd floor of Wing B. Beyond consolidating our digital systems staff in this one location, we’re also building a new server room in the same area. Assuming the electrical and HVAC challenges of that retrofitting are solved, we should leave behind the many environmental challenges we’ve seen here in the Johnson Center.