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Top Forums UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users Comparing experience with AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris Post 302524553 by wenp on Monday 23rd of May 2011 07:24:38 PM
Old 05-23-2011
Comparing experience with AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris

I'm investigating AIX/HP-UX/Solaris for use in a research environment. Although there is plenty of technical documentation online, some important questions can only be answered from long user experience. I'd like to hear whatever you can contribute if you can compare at least two of these.

To get more specific, the proposed deployment is workstations for lab work. I suppose this case is quite different from server use. On the workstations, there will be no commercial software other than the OS; most of it will be data analysis tools written by subject specialists. Instead of setting up one machine to run unchanged for a long time, the workstations will have frequent changes of configuration by users of varying levels of skill.

I have four main areas of concern about which I'd like to hear your comparative evaluation of the three platforms:

1. Ease of building software developed on other *nix platforms.
Most of the tools we install would be only available as source code. So a major convenience factor will be how much effort is required to get things to build properly on a particular platform. I suppose the two main factors to consider are how "standard" the Unix flavor is and availability of debugging tools.

2. Stability against application crashing.
The workstations will be used for long computation and compilation jobs as well as productivity tasks. It is very important that a crashing app hangs nothing more than itself.

3. Convenience and stability of OS level virtualization
Virtualization is I suppose the strongest strategy for isolating a process. It should be quick to set up, be lightweight and stable, and completely prevent unwanted interaction with the host OS.

4. Ease of maintenance.
When things go wrong (buggy app, bad driver, stupid user, etc.), how much effort to pinpoint the problem and find/implement a fix? I'm thinking of the combined effects of opacity of the system, quality of documentation, community help, etc.

Any other points of comparison between AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris I'd be glad to hear also.

Cheers
 

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RRDBUILD(1)							      rrdtool							       RRDBUILD(1)

NAME
rrdbuild - Instructions for building RRDtool OVERVIEW
If you downloaded the source of RRDtool you have to compile it. This document will give some information on how this is done. RRDtool relies on services of third part libraries. Some of these libraries may already be installed on your system. You have to compile copies of the other ones before you can build RRDtool. This document will tell you about all the necessary steps to get going. These instructions assume you are using a bash shell. If you use csh/tcsh, then you can either type bash to switch to bash for the compilation or if you know what you are doing just replace the export bits with setenv. We further assume that your copies of tar and make are actually GNU tar and GNU make respectively. It could be that they are installed as gtar and gmake on your system. OPTIMISTIC BUILD
Before you start to build RRDtool, you have to decide two things: 1. In which directory you want to build the software. 2. Where you want to install the software. Once you have decided. Save the two locations into environment variables. BUILD_DIR=/tmp/rrdbuild INSTALL_DIR=/opt/rrdtool-1.4.7 If your /tmp is mounted with the option noexec (RHEL seems todo that) you have to choose a different directory! Now make sure the BUILD_DIR exists and go there: mkdir -p $BUILD_DIR cd $BUILD_DIR Lets first assume you already have all the necessary libraries pre-installed. wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.4.7.tar.gz gunzip -c rrdtool-1.4.7.tar.gz | tar xf - cd rrdtool-1.4.7 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR && make && make install Ok, this was very optimistic. This try will probably have ended with configure complaining about several missing libraries. INSTALLING DEPENDENCIES
If your OS lets you install additional packages from a software repository, you may get away with installing the missing packages. When the packages are installed, run configure again and try to compile again. Below you find some hints on getting your OS ready for compiling RRDtool. Additions to this list are welcome. In general RRDtool should work with the latest versions of the libraries. The versions listed here are just what was current when I tested this. OpenSolaris 2008.05 Just add a compiler and the gnome development package: pkg install sunstudioexpress pkg install SUNWgnome-common-devel There is a problem with cairo.pc on OpenSolaris. It suggests that xrender is required for compilation with cairo. This is not true and also bad since OpenSolaris does not include an xrender.pc file. Use Perl to fix this: perl -i~ -p -e 's/(Requires.*?)s*xrender.*/$1/' /usr/lib/pkgconfig/cairo.pc Make sure the RRDtool build system finds your new compiler export PATH=/opt/SunStudioExpress/bin Debian / Ubuntu Use apt-get to make sure you have all that is required. A number of packages will get added through dependencies. apt-get install libpango1.0-dev libxml2-dev Gentoo In Gentoo installing RRDtool is really simple you just need to emerge rrdtool. All dependencies will be handled automatically by the portage system. The only thing you should care about are USE flags, which allow you fine tune features RRDtool will be built with. Currently the following USE flags are available: doc - install .html and .txt documentation into /usr/share/doc/rrdtool-1.x.xx/ perl - build and install perl language bindings python - build and install python language bindings ruby - build and install ruby language bindings tcl - build and install tcl language bindings rrdcgi - build and install rrdcgi After you've decided which USE flags you need, set them either in make.conf or /etc/portage/package.use and finally run: # emerge -va rrdtool Take a look at Gentoo handbook for further details on how to manage USE flags: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2 BUILDING DEPENDENCIES
But again this may have been too optimistic still, and you actually have to compile your own copies of some of the required libraries. Things like libpng and zlib are pretty standard so you will probably have them on your system anyway. Freetype, Fontinst, Cairo, Pango may be installed, but it is possible that they are pretty old and thus don't live up to our expectations, so you may want to compile their latest versions. General build tips for AIX If you are working with AIX, you may find the --disable-shared option will cause things to break for you. In that case you may have to install the shared libraries into the RRDtool PREFIX and work with --disable-static instead. Another hint to get RRDtool working on AIX is to use the IBM XL C Compiler: export CC=/usr/vac/bin/cc export PERLCC=$CC (Better instructions for AIX welcome!) Build Instructions Some libraries want to know where other libraries are. For this to work, set the following environment variable export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${INSTALL_DIR}/lib/pkgconfig export PATH=$INSTALL_DIR/bin:$PATH The above relies on the presence of the pkgconfig program. Below you find instructions on how to compile pkgconfig. Since we are compiling libraries dynamically, they must know where to find each other. This is done by setting an appropriate LDFLAGS. Unfortunately, the syntax again differs from system to system: Solaris export LDFLAGS=-R${INSTALL_DIR}/lib if you are using the Sun Studio/Forte compiler, you may also want to set CFLAGS="-xO3 -xcode=pic13" (SPARC) CFLAGS="-xO3 -Kpic" (x86) Linux export LDFLAGS="-Wl,--rpath -Wl,${INSTALL_DIR}/lib" HPUX export LDFLAGS="+b${INSTALL_DIR}/lib" AIX export LDFLAGS="-Wl,-blibpath:${INSTALL_DIR}/lib" If you have GNU make installed and it is not called 'make', then do export MAKE=gmake export GNUMAKE=gmake otherwise just do export MAKE=make Building pkgconfig As mentioned above, without pkgconfig the whole build process will be lots of pain and suffering, so make sure you have a copy on your system. If it is not available natively, here is how to compile it. wget http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/releases/pkg-config-0.23.tar.gz gunzip -c pkg-config-0.23.tar.gz | tar xf - cd pkg-config-0.23 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" $MAKE $MAKE install After installing pkgconfig in a custom directory, setting up the corresponding environment variable will be helpful. export PKG_CONFIG=$INSTALL_DIR/bin/pkg-config Building zlib Chances are very high that you already have that on your system ... cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz gunzip -c zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz | tar xf - cd zlib-1.2.3 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" --shared $MAKE $MAKE install Building libpng Libpng itself requires zlib to build, so we need to help a bit. If you already have a copy of zlib on your system (which is very likely) you can drop the settings of LDFLAGS and CPPFLAGS. Note that the backslash () at the end of line 4 means that line 4 and line 5 are on one line. cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/libpng-1.2.18.tar.gz gunzip -c libpng-1.2.18.tar.gz | tar xf - cd libpng-1.2.10 env CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR $MAKE $MAKE install Building freetype cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz gunzip -c freetype-2.3.5.tar.gz | tar xf - cd freetype-2.3.5 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" $MAKE $MAKE install If you run into problems building freetype on Solaris, you may want to try to add the following at the start the configure line: env EGREP=egrep Building LibXML2 cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/libxml2-2.6.32.tar.gz gunzip -c libxml2-2.6.32.tar.gz | tar xf - cd libxml2-2.6.32 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" $MAKE $MAKE install Building fontconfig Note that fontconfig has a run time configuration file in INSTALL_DIR/etc you may want to adjust that so that fontconfig finds the fonts on your system. Run the fc-cache program to build the fontconfig cache after changing the config file. cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/fontconfig-2.4.2.tar.gz gunzip -c fontconfig-2.4.2.tar.gz | tar xf - cd fontconfig-2.4.2 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" --with-freetype-config=$INSTALL_DIR/bin/freetype-config $MAKE $MAKE install Building Pixman cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/pixman-0.10.0.tar.gz gunzip -c pixman-0.10.0.tar.gz | tar xf - cd pixman-0.10.0 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" $MAKE $MAKE install Building Cairo cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/cairo-1.6.4.tar.gz gunzip -c cairo-1.6.4.tar.gz | tar xf - cd cairo-1.6.4 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR --enable-xlib=no --enable-xlib-render=no --enable-win32=no CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" $MAKE $MAKE install When building on Solaris you may want todo ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR --enable-xlib=no --enable-xlib-render=no --enable-win32=no CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC -D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS" Building Glib cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/glib-2.15.4.tar.gz gunzip -c glib-2.15.4.tar.gz | tar xf - cd glib-2.15.4 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" $MAKE $MAKE install Building Pango cd $BUILD_DIR wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/libs/pango-1.21.1.tar.bz2 bunzip2 -c pango-1.21.1.tar.bz2 | tar xf - cd pango-1.21.1 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR CFLAGS="-O3 -fPIC" --without-x $MAKE $MAKE install Building rrdtool (second try) Now all the dependent libraries are built and you can try again. This time you tell configure where it should be looking for libraries and include files. This is done via environment variables. Depending on the shell you are running, the syntax for setting environment variables is different. And finally try building again. We disable the python and tcl bindings because it seems that a fair number of people have ill configured python and tcl setups that would prevent RRDtool from building if they are included in their current state. cd $BUILD_DIR/rrdtool-1.4.7 ./configure --prefix=$INSTALL_DIR --disable-tcl --disable-python $MAKE clean $MAKE $MAKE install SOLARIS HINT: if you want to build the Perl module for the native Perl (the one shipping with Solaris) you will need the Sun Forte compiler installed on your box or you have to hand-tune bindings/perl-shared/Makefile while building! Now go to $INSTALL_DIR/share/rrdtool/examples/ and run them to see if your build has been successful. AUTHOR
Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch> 1.4.7 2012-01-24 RRDBUILD(1)
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