1. Download the latest version of the “file” program from ftp://ftp.astron.com/pub/file/ (my case the current is 5.03)
2. Unzip/untar the file
3. Configure and run make:

3. There are a bunch of other requirements for mediatomb, the easiest way to get them is to use www.blastwave.org. The packages that I installed are:
CSWbdb4
CSWbzip2
CSWcurl
CSWcurlrt
CSWexpat
CSWfaac
CSWfaad2
CSWfconfig
CSWffmpeg
CSWffmpeglib
CSWftype2
CSWgcc3corert
CSWgcc3g++rt
CSWgcrypt
CSWggettext
CSWgpgerr
CSWiconv
CSWid3lib
CSWimlib2
CSWisaexec
CSWlame
CSWliba52
CSWlibid3tag
CSWlibidn
CSWlibnet
CSWlibogg
CSWlibsdl
CSWlibssh2
CSWlibtool
CSWlibtoolrt
CSWlibx11
CSWlibxau
CSWlibxcb
CSWlibxdmcp
CSWncurses
CSWoldaprt
CSWossl
CSWossldevel
CSWosslrt
CSWosslutils
CSWpixman
CSWpng
CSWsasl
CSWsdlmixer
CSWsqlite3
CSWsqlite3dev
CSWstl4
CSWsunmath
CSWtaglibgcc
CSWtheora
CSWtiff
CSWungif
CSWvorbis
CSWxvid
CSWzlib

4. Once these are installed, you can download mediatomb and compile it. http://mediatomb.cc/pages/download

However before you can run gmake, you need to edit a couple of files. One is the src/main.cc, you need to comment out lines 128 through 141. This is not needed for Solaris. The second file to edit is a result of this:

During the compile I got an error that looked like this:

To fix it edit the src/url.cc file and on line 78 change it from this:

to this :

Then rerun gmake . Once the compile is finished, su to root and do a gmake install, it will place all the media tomb stuff in /mediatomb. (I am using a Zone on a Solaris 10 machine so / has plenty of space).

I then created a user for mediatomb to be run under, so a user and group called mediatmb were created, and all the /mediatomb directories and files were changed to be owned by mediatmb

Once that was done, login as the mediatmb user and create a script in /mediatmb/bin with the following in it:

where x.x.x.x is the IP address of the machine you are running it on. In Constantin’s blog, he mentioned also using the interface, but I found that it had problems since this was a zone. So instead of using the interface, I used the IP address of the zone.

The changes I made to the config.xml in the ~/.mediatomb directory are as follows:

Now all you have to do is login to the web interface and add the media, following mediatomb’s documentation.

Some interesting things I have found with it:

1. If your PS3 is on wireless it may have problems streaming mp4, but not mpeg2. Weird I know as the mpeg2 was solid streaming at 370kb/s, but it couldn’t handle the mp4. Switching to a hardwired connection fixed that problem.

2. If you happen to be a ReplayTV user [cause TiVO is a wanna be replay ] you can use MediaTomb in conjunction with DVArchive, which also runs nicely in my Solaris zone. Just point a media directory at the Local_Guide directory and mediatomb will stream every MPEG2 file in that directory to your PS3. Which is pretty damn cool.

3. The PS3 is very pickly about it’s mp4 type files. Some that I made with handbrake don’t work, but ones I did with ffmpegx worked once I put the hardwired connection in.

4. I have not tried any of the transcoding stuff. I would rather do that before and not bog down my server doing that.

5. I need to do a lot of reading on how to make folders and the such so that my collection is organized and not just all under one directory.

For those interested:
My compile environment is setup like this:

Let me be probably not the first to say that OpenSolaris != Solaris.. I have been using Solaris 10 since it was in beta, and OpenSolaris through me for a couple of loops…

First are some of the cool things I liked:

1. The interface, it is updated and seemed a lot faster.

2. The ease of “patching” only took about half an hour to do a pkg image update.

3. Zfs root made it easy to roll back changes..

Now the parts that i had problems with and did not like too well.

1. I had to download a driver for my ethernet card as the one Sun delivers (sk98sol) is still too old and did not support my card which is one built on to a 3+ year old motherboard.

2. To create a zone, you MUST have a network connection (and at least to the internet for the time being). This really made me mad as I sometimes don’t have access to the Internet, and if I need to create a zone, I don’t want to have to wait for it to download 200+ Mb of packages, that are already on the machine in the first place.

3. No more “full root zones”, I created a zone in the hopes of installing the Comms Suite in it, only to find out that it was not a full root zone and stuff that is required by the Comms Installer to be there wasn’t and therefor I could not install it… Such simple things like unzip and perl are missing from the newly created zone.

In the end, I ended up reinstalling the box with Solaris 10 05/08, which was a task in itself. See when you install OpenSolaris it makes the root drive zfs, and did  some weird things to the VTOC. Therefore when I went in to do the install of the “older” Solaris 10 05/08, the installer would show me the disk, let me “carve” it up like I wanted in the gui and via command line, but when the install went to go on, the installer always came back saying that there was not enough disk to install Solaris. What I ended up having to do was go and do a “format -e” and then fdisk and delete the Solaris partition that was made by OpenSolaris, and let the Solaris installer create it’s own fdisk partition again.

So after finally getting Solaris 10 installed and the latest Recommended/Security/Sun Alert patches put on, I called it a night and left the Comms install for next weekend.

Overall I think OpenSolaris is going in the right direction, but there needs to be a lot of things fixed in it.. The biggest is the zones, there should be an option for “cloning” the already installed OS, since it is already on a ZFS pool. The second is that there should be an option when creating the zone as to what kind of zone it should be, whether a full (which would load every package, so you don’t have to try and do it  your self), sparse or maybe a new one called Jail which has everything in it read only.

Well that could not be good. So I ended up going in to the office. Tried unplugging the Sun Ray and plugging it back in. This is when I saw the 9 D error icon. Nice little icon with a picture of a USB connector and a yellow triangle. So I unplugged it and disconnected the keyboard and mouse and then plugged it back in. Still got the same error. The funny thing about the error is, it is listed as this in the docs:

This is an over current condition on the USB bus, i.e., the total number of devices draws too much current . Consider using a powered hub.

So now I ended up swaping it out with one that was in my office and rebuilding the multi-head group, and they were all set. The interesting thing about it is that the status LED stayed green, instead of turning amber. So the next morning I tried it on a different server (the original server it was attached to is running SRSS 2.0 still) that was running SRSS 3.1, this time nothing showed up in the log files, but the Sun Ray still showed the USB 9 icon and the keyboard and mouse did not work. So I ended up calling it in for replacement. It is nice that the Sun Ray’s have a long warrenty period. This one was bought 2 or 3 years ago.

In an unrelated note, I have to go in early to get a power backplane replaced in one of our V890′s because we have went through three power supplies in the PS0 slot in under a month. The bad part about this is the 890 has 11 zones on it and 1TB of disk, so we are going to have some services out while Sun replaces the backplane and power supply. Hopefully this will fix it though.

For some people MS Windows is the only thing they know, but for others if you use Solaris and ZFS, things go much faster and are much better.

Now that I have a ZFS file system, I can clone my zones instead of having to install each one. I really like zfs!

One note, that I came across creating a zfs file system. One of the disks previously had a ufs file system on it and it would not let me create the pool. to get around it I did this:

The error that caused me to do this was:

The numbers he mentioned: They had assumed that Linux on white boxes would be their best option and cheapest option because of a total open source stack of software. These are fully loaded costs per server for 36 months, including electricity, space and support:

- Intel whitebox hardware + Linux software: $10,350
- AMD whitebox hardware + Linux software: $9,180
- Non-Sun AMD (whitebox) hardware + Solaris: $5,700
- Sun’s AMD hardware + Solaris: $4,760

Pay close attention to the end of the video when he talks about Linux Support costs.

First off, for what ever reason IBM/Tivoli decided that the config files (dsm.sys/dsm.opt) should go in /usr/bin. Why I don’t have a clue but that is not a place where they should go. What is even worse is that when you install the client it puts symlinks to /usr/bin/dsm.[opt|sys] in the /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin directory.

What is even better is how they make the symlinks… Any ways to get TSM to work in zones, what I did was change the order the symlinks are. I put the actual config files in /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin and then did a symlink in /usr/bin to the /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin directory in the global zone (as the /usr filesystem in the non global zones are read only), so now I have this:

This way each zone can have their own dsm.[opt|sys].. There is one “gotcha” with this method, make sure you back up your files before you upgrade the client. I am not sure at the moment whether they would be removed if you upgrade the client or not. Technically the files (dsm.[sys|opt]) should go in /etc and then symlinks from /usr/bin and /opt/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin to them.

N.B. This is probably unsupported by IBM and you use at your own risk.

Technorati Tags: Tivoli, TSM, Solaris, Containers, Zones

On a side bar, I decided to see exactly how fast this domain was. (Wish I would have got one of the trial T2000 machines to compare againest, but that is another story).. So my test was to see how long it would take to compile Apache + PHP on the machine. Here are the results:

Compiling PHP 5.0.4

Single thread using make and gcc

real 2m27.49s
user 2m10.31s
sys 0m7.35s

Single thread using gmake and gcc
real 2m26.58s
user 2m10.26s
sys 0m7.02s

48 threads using gmake and gcc
real 0m16.00s
user 2m14.58s
sys 0m12.58s

Apache+PHP
Single thread using make and gcc
real 0m14.63s
user 0m10.38s
sys 0m1.15s

Single thread using gmake and gcc
real 0m14.33s
user 0m10.33s
sys 0m1.08s

48 threads with gmake and gcc
real 0m4.02s
user 0m10.47s
sys 0m1.94s

Needless to say it is pretty darn fast. Need to find something a little larger to play with and maybe use the Sun Studio Compilers to see how much of a difference that makes.

Output from creating one zone on the E25K: