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My boss has handed over half a dozen Sun boxes and two Google search appliances for me to manage. We have two other sysadmins that manage the core OS and hardware upgrades, which is incredibly helpful. They also do the backups. What I've been doing is systematically updating all of the packages that we use for web services. On the core build machine that's more than 50 apps and modules. We compile from source in order of dependency, make the tweaks, and move on to the next one. Once the core machine is done we push the compiled files to the others via a neat Unix script and walk through the installs. Takes a couple of days to do the core machine, then about a day per box after that. Keep in mind that the whole time I'm usually multi-tasking since most of the installs just take proc crunch time. So far so good. And then today I tried to install Orbeon web forms and discovered the joys of software dependencies.
After downloading the Orbeon source and RTFM'ing, I discovered we needed Tomcat. Did some Googling and found out that you can run Apache and Apache Tomcat together with the mod_jk connector. Went and got the source for Tomcat and mod_jk. Read the manual for Tomcat. First problem: to build Tomcat from source you have to use Ant. We use GCC and Gmake, not Ant. So I went and got Apache Ant. Read The Manual. Did the install and got it going in an hour or so. Back to Tomcat. After several builds with Ant -each throwing an error for JUnit- I Googled it up. Got JUnit. Installed it. Ran Ant on Tomcat again. Same error. Deleted Tomcat. Untarred source again, set environmental variables. Ran Ant. Same error. Googled more. Turned out I didn't need JUnit after all; found an entry in the Ant FAQ with a workaround. Did the workaround. Set more environmental variables. Ran Ant again. Same error. Again. Re-read The Manual. Noticed a line I'd missed that we need J2RE 1.5.x. We have 1.4.6. Called the SysAdmin and asked if he could help, since I didn't want to touch Sun's install of the JRE. He laughed and said, "Sure thing. Now you've experienced the joys of lateral Unix upgrades." Yep. For nine straight hours. And I still have Tomcat and then Orbeon to get working. |