Because I’m trying to meet up with a friend of mine in from out of town today, I was forced to scratch a fishing trip to Ten Mile Creek out in Frisco, CO. So all of a sudden I found myself with an extra few hours of my schedule – which makes me feel sort of like I do when I put on a coat I haven’t worn for a while and find a $20 bill in one of the pockets. So as not to waste this unexpected gold mine of free time, I decided I’d get a few things up and running on our V20Z.
While I have plans for that box later this week (schedule permitting) I wanted to get a wiki up and running at a minimum and give it a domain so I can stop pointing to it with a straight IP. So during a leisurely lunch here at the Handlebar & Grill (their network doesn’t lock down many ports, making SSH – as well as IMAP – feasible), I did the following:
- Installed Apache using Blastwave (pkg-get -i apache2 [1]); incidentally, Blastwave is currently running a fundraising effort and RedMonk was happy to contribute a modest sum. We encourage anyone using such community based resource to remember to donate, as bandwidth/hosting/etc cost money.
- Did the basic Apache configuration bit; dropping in a new index page, etc
- Installed Ruby (Blastwave has 1.8.1), also via Blastwave (pkg-get -i ruby)
- Fetched the Ruby on Rails-based Instiki packages (wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5356/instiki-0.10.2.zip) and unzipped them
- Installed Instiki – got a weird error
- Fetched 0.10.1 of Instiki and unzipped that (unzip instiki.0.10.1.zip)
- Installed Instiki successfully (ruby instiki)
- Configured Instiki to run in the background via the instructions here:
nohup /opt/csw/bin/ruby /export/home/user/instiki-0.10.1/instiki
–storage /var/instiki
>& /var/logs/instiki.`date08212005.log & - Pointed a test domain at it using the 1and1 Domain admin interface, which is pretty simple to use
One thing that I couldn’t figure out was how to get an Apache virtual host configured so as to make available a wiki.domain.com type URL. I tried a variation of this:
ServerName wiki.mydomain.com
ProxyPass / http://127.0.0.1:2500/
ProxyPassReverse / http://127.0.0.1:2500/
as it was recommended by the Instiki page here. I kept getting some error about “‘\ServerName’, perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included” – anybody know what’s up with that? My Apache experience is limited mostly to .htaccess files and the like.
Right now, the wiki’s nothing more than a proof-of-concept/placeholder at the moment, but I’ll drop in a link here as soon as I’m happy with the status of the box itself.
This was a very basic install, but I do find it interesting that the deployment of Ruby on Rails apps is pretty much dead simple using the Blastwave & Solaris 10 combination (though I think Instiki’s documentation could be a bit better). I expected to have more trouble finding applications for Solaris than Linux, but who knows – maybe there’s something to these cross-platform dynamic languages 😉
Anyway, next up this week: Splunk for my local Linux box and another Solaris project.
[1] One complaint about pkg-get is that it demands a lot of user interaction; I had to key in “y” seven or eight times during the install. I’m used to unattended installations with Linux, and would prefer that.
