Tag: Solaris

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Splunk 7.0 the good and bad

So I will preface this post by saying I love Splunk, it is the best log aggregation application out there.

So on with the post, and it must be a good one right? Anyways, Splunk released version 7.0 of their Splunk Enterprise product last week during their .Conf 2017 conference, which I was an FTR at. There were a few new features in it that were amazing, such as the new metrics index type which was blazingly fast. So like all “fanboys” of anything I decided to update my home server on Thursday night after the conference was over. This is where the fun began.

First when I started using Splunk years ago, it supported a myriad of operating systems for the servers. If you wanted Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, HP-UX, MacOSX, Windows or Linux you were golden. However over the years that list has been pared back to now just Linux and Windows. (MacOSX is supported, but only for the free and trial editions. Basically used for development and home use, not for enterprise use.)

So now that Solaris is no longer supported, I needed to switch my home system from OpenIndiana (aka OpenSolaris) over to Linux. With that I spun up a new CentOS 7 VM on my home server, and copied over all my Splunk data from the Solaris one to the Linux one. I then removed the bin and lib directories (I use the tar installs and that is they only place machine specific binaries exist.) With that done, I untarred the Linux Splunk 7.0 over top my current directory and started it up. So far everything was good, until I tried to do a search. If it was a search for like the last 15 minutes it worked, but anything over that was dead because one of the hot buckets was corrupted. I am not sure if it happened during the transit or what. So off to the fsck commmand to try to fix them. An hour or so later it couldn’t fix some of them, so it was getting late and I just went to bed.

The next day when I returned home I tried to log in to my Splunk instance to see how it was doing, to my surprise I couldn’t even log in to it. It appeared that the linux host had crashed. I was dumbfounded as I hadn’t seen an actual kernel panic like that in a while. So I restarted the machine and started splunk back up and everything was working again.

A few days past and I went to check on it again, and once again it was dead. So now I am really curious. I ended up installing the crash utilities on the host and started going through the vmcore files. Yup each time it crashed it was splunkd that caused it. Unfortunately I don’t know much more than that as to what is actually causing it to happen. It appears to happen at random times.

The output of crash shows this:

KERNEL: /usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/3.10.0-693.2.2.el7.x86_64/vmlinux
DUMPFILE: /var/crash/127.0.0.1-2017-10-01-12:26:50/vmcore [PARTIAL DUMP]
CPUS: 8
DATE: Sun Oct 1 12:26:43 2017
UPTIME: 1 days, 17:12:55
LOAD AVERAGE: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
TASKS: 330
NODENAME: splunk
RELEASE: 3.10.0-693.2.2.el7.x86_64
VERSION: #1 SMP Tue Sep 12 22:26:13 UTC 2017
MACHINE: x86_64 (3399 Mhz)
MEMORY: 3 GB
PANIC: "double fault: 0000 [#1] SMP "
PID: 1420
COMMAND: "splunkd"
TASK: ffff8800bae91fa0 [THREAD_INFO: ffff880000120000]
CPU: 3
STATE: TASK_RUNNING (PANIC)

First few lines of the “bt” output from crash:
PID: 1420 TASK: ffff8800bae91fa0 CPU: 3 COMMAND: "splunkd"
#0 [ffff8800bfac4d88] machine_kexec at ffffffff8105c4cb
#1 [ffff8800bfac4de8] __crash_kexec at ffffffff81104a32
#2 [ffff8800bfac4eb8] crash_kexec at ffffffff81104b20
#3 [ffff8800bfac4ed0] oops_end at ffffffff816ad2b8
#4 [ffff8800bfac4ef8] die at ffffffff8102e97b
#5 [ffff8800bfac4f28] do_double_fault at ffffffff8102b6e2
#6 [ffff8800bfac4f50] double_fault at ffffffff816b6908
[exception RIP: page_fault+13]
RIP: ffffffff816ac52d RSP: ffff880000122fc8 RFLAGS: 00010092
RAX: 0000000000000ff8 RBX: 0000000000000000 RCX: ffffffff816ac2ac
RDX: 00001fffffffffff RSI: ffffffff81a73118 RDI: 0000000000000000
RBP: ffff880000123098 R8: ffffffff81911167 R9: ffffea00002e7b80
R10: ffffea00002e7b80 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: ffffffff81a73118
R13: ffffffff81a73118 R14: ffff880000120000 R15: ffff88008665a580
ORIG_RAX: ffffffffffffffff CS: 0010 SS: 0000
--- ---
#7 [ffff880000122fc8] page_fault at ffffffff816ac52d
#8 [ffff880000123048] spurious_fault at ffffffff816afd8e
#9 [ffff8800001230a0] __do_page_fault at ffffffff816b01ae
#10 [ffff880000123100] do_page_fault at ffffffff816b0325
#11 [ffff880000123130] page_fault at ffffffff816ac548
[exception RIP: spurious_fault+48]
RIP: ffffffff816afd8e RSP: ffff8800001231e8 RFLAGS: 00010002
RAX: 0000000000000ff8 RBX: 0000000000000000 RCX: ffffffff816ac2ac
RDX: 00001fffffffffff RSI: ffffffff81a73118 RDI: 0000000000000000
RBP: ffff880000123208 R8: ffffffff81911167 R9: ffffea00002e7b80
R10: ffffea00002e7b80 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: ffffffff81a73118
R13: ffffffff81a73118 R14: ffff880000120000 R15: ffff88008665a580
ORIG_RAX: ffffffffffffffff CS: 0010 SS: 0000
#12 [ffff880000123210] __do_page_fault at ffffffff816b01ae
#13 [ffff880000123270] do_page_fault at ffffffff816b0325
#14 [ffff8800001232a0] page_fault at ffffffff816ac548
[exception RIP: spurious_fault+48]
RIP: ffffffff816afd8e RSP: ffff880000123358 RFLAGS: 00010002
RAX: 0000000000000ff8 RBX: 0000000000000000 RCX: ffffffff816ac2ac
RDX: 00001fffffffffff RSI: ffffffff81a73118 RDI: 0000000000000000
RBP: ffff880000123378 R8: ffffffff81911167 R9: ffffea00002e7b80
R10: ffffea00002e7b80 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: ffffffff81a73118
R13: ffffffff81a73118 R14: ffff880000120000 R15: ffff88008665a580
ORIG_RAX: ffffffffffffffff CS: 0010 SS: 0000

Output from the “vm” command:
PID: 1420 TASK: ffff8800bae91fa0 CPU: 3 COMMAND: "splunkd"
MM PGD RSS TOTAL_VM
ffff88008665a580 ffff8800b87f4000 324076k 864244k
VMA START END FLAGS FILE
ffff8800a5efe5e8 563d22303000 563d248b7000 8000875 /splunk/splunk/bin/splunkd
ffff8800a5efe438 563d248b7000 563d24964000 8100873 /splunk/splunk/bin/splunkd
ffff8800a5efe288 563d24964000 563d249db000 8100073
ffff880097e90438 7f4f8d800000 7f4f8ea00000 8200073
ffff8800a1f6cd80 7f4f90400000 7f4f91c00000 8200073
ffff8800a1f6ca20 7f4f923f7000 7f4f923f8000 8100070
ffff8800a1f6c948 7f4f923f8000 7f4f925f8000 8100073
ffff8800a1f6c6c0 7f4f925f8000 7f4f925f9000 8100070
ffff8800a1f6c798 7f4f925f9000 7f4f927f9000 8100073
ffff8800a1f6cca8 7f4f927f9000 7f4f927fa000 8100070
ffff8800a1f6c870 7f4f927fa000 7f4f929fa000 8100073
ffff88009ce66948 7f4f935ff000 7f4f93600000 8100070
ffff88009ce66a20 7f4f93600000 7f4f93a00000 8100073
ffff88009466aca8 7f4f93a00000 7f4f94800000 8200073
ffff88009ca98e58 7f4f949cd000 7f4f949e3000 8000075 /usr/lib64/libresolv-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98d80 7f4f949e3000 7f4f94be3000 8000070 /usr/lib64/libresolv-2.17.so
ffff88009ca99008 7f4f94be3000 7f4f94be4000 8100071 /usr/lib64/libresolv-2.17.so
ffff88009ca990e0 7f4f94be4000 7f4f94be5000 8100073 /usr/lib64/libresolv-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98f30 7f4f94be5000 7f4f94be7000 8100073
ffff88009ca98bd0 7f4f94be7000 7f4f94bec000 8000075 /usr/lib64/libnss_dns-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98af8 7f4f94bec000 7f4f94deb000 8000070 /usr/lib64/libnss_dns-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98ca8 7f4f94deb000 7f4f94dec000 8100071 /usr/lib64/libnss_dns-2.17.so
ffff88009ca991b8 7f4f94dec000 7f4f94ded000 8100073 /usr/lib64/libnss_dns-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98798 7f4f94ded000 7f4f94df9000 8000075 /usr/lib64/libnss_files-2.17.so
ffff88009ca986c0 7f4f94df9000 7f4f94ff8000 8000070 /usr/lib64/libnss_files-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98948 7f4f94ff8000 7f4f94ff9000 8100071 /usr/lib64/libnss_files-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98a20 7f4f94ff9000 7f4f94ffa000 8100073 /usr/lib64/libnss_files-2.17.so
ffff88009ca98870 7f4f94ffa000 7f4f95000000 8100073
ffff8800a1f6ce58 7f4f95000000 7f4f95600000 8200073
ffff880036735cb0 7f4f957ef000 7f4f957f0000 8100070
ffff880036735878 7f4f957f0000 7f4f959f0000 8100073
ffff880036735a28 7f4f959f0000 7f4f959f1000 8100070
ffff880036734af8 7f4f959f1000 7f4f95bf1000 8100073
ffff880036735d88 7f4f95bf1000 7f4f95bf2000 8100070

So now that means I will definitely hold off upgrading my production servers as if this is happening on my personal one, then I can only imagine what would happen to larger instances. It could also be a result of me being a fanboy and installing the .0 release of software, which any good admin will tell you “just say no to .0”.

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OpenSSL and Solaris 10

So if you are still running Solaris 10 and haven’t looked at the patches recently, Oracle bundled in OpenSSL 1.0.1 as a patch. While this was awesome to see an updated version, now that everyone should only be running TLSv1.2 on their websites, there are some issues. The main issue is that the GCC version that is supplied with Solaris 10 for what ever reason has /usr/sfw/include and /usr/sfw/lib hardcoded in to the gcc binary as the first Include and Library path. While I can understand why it was probably done to begin with, it makes compiling any software that needs an updated version of OpenSSL completely impossible.

For example say you wanted to compile a new *AMP stack, and wanted the latest version of Apache with SSL enabled. Well, it won’t work. It will by default use the old 0.9.7 OpenSSL libraries and include files. I spent days on this, even compiled my own version of OpenSSL and tried to link against it, still wouldn’t work and kept linking against the 0.9.7 ones..

So how to fix this? Well you could build your own version of GCC, which in and of itself is not an easy task. You also can’t remove the OpenSSL 0.9.7 libraries as there is a lot that depends on it. So if you read the patch notes for the new OpenSSL they give some “recipes” on ways to maybe possibly fix it during compile time. Which for me did not work. So what I ended up doing was this:

 

  1. In /usr/sfw/include I moved the openssl directory to .openssl. The new 1.0.1 includes are in /usr/include/openssl.
  2. In /usr/sfw/lib I removed the symlink from libssl.so and libcrypto.so. Also did this in /usr/sfw/lib/amd64. This allows those apps that are using the actual libssl.so.0.9.7 to still run, but compile time stuff can’t find them.

Once I did that, I went back to the apache directory and did the compile and yippie, it was against the /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.1.0.1 and /usr/lib/libssl.so.1.0.1, which also meant that I could limit Apache to only use TLSv1.2.

 

So If this helps just one person, great.. This was something that took me a few �weeks to figure out. I also should have noted that if I had fully read the readme in the patch that introduced OpenSSL it would have probably went a little faster… If you are worried about breaking stuff, once you get your compile done, you can put the symlinks back and move the openssl directory back to it’s original place.

N.B. I am not sure if the gcc in Solaris 11 has the same quirk.

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Subversion on Solaris

So I have been trying to find the “definitive” guide on compiling and installing Subverison on Solaris. There are random sites over the interwebs that have a spattering of different tips, so I thought I would write one how how I did it and what all was done. When you finish this, you will have a basic Subversion system up and running to which you can then further lock down… Requirements: I downloaded the following:

  1. Subversion 1.8.10 (http://mirror.metrocast.net/apache/subversion/subversion-1.8.10.tar.gz)
  2. APR 1.5.1 (http://mirror.metrocast.net/apache/apr/apr-1.5.1.tar.gz)
  3. APR Util 1.5.3 (http://mirror.metrocast.net/apache/apr/apr-util-1.5.3.tar.gz)
  4. scons 2.3.0 (http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scons/scons-local-2.3.0.tar.gz)
  5. Serf 1.3.7 (http://serf.googlecode.com/svn/src_releases/serf-1.3.7.tar.bz2)
  6. Apache HTTPD 2.2.27 (http://mirror.metrocast.net/apache/httpd/httpd-2.2.27.tar.bz2)
  7. SQLite 3.8.6 (http://www.sqlite.org/2014/sqlite-autoconf-3080600.tar.gz)
  8. ViewVC 1.1.22 (http://viewvc.tigris.org/files/documents/3330/49347/viewvc-1.1.22.tar.gz)
  9. diffutils 3.2 (http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/diffutils/diffutils-3.2.tar.gz) [ Needed for ViewVC to work ]

Next up is compiling the software. This is the order I did things:

  1. Apache HTTP Server
  2. APR
  3. APR-Util
  4. SQLite
  5. scons
  6. serf
  7. subversion
  8. viewvc
  9. diffutils

I put all the tar balls in a directory called svn in my home directory. So all the instructions below are relative to it.

 

Apache HTTP Server 

cd httpd-2.2.27
./configure --prefix=/opt/svnweb --with-ssl=/usr/sfw --with-ldap --enable-mods-shared="ssl deflate rewrite ldap authnz-ldap dav dav-fs dav-lock"
make
make install

 

APR

cd apr-1.5.1
./configure --prefix=/opt/sungeek
make
make install

 

APR-Util

cd apr-util-1.5.3
./configure --prefix=/opt/sungeek --with-apr=/opt/sungeek
make
make install

 

SQLite

cd sqlite-autoconf-3080500
./configure --prefix=/opt/sungeek
make
make install

 

scons


mkdir /home/unixwiz/scons
cd scons
tar -xvf ../scons-local-2.3.0.tar
ln -s /home/unixwiz/scons/scons.py /home/unixwiz/bin/scons

(made sure the link points to a directory in your path)

 

serf

At line 251 of SConstruct add the following (this is needed to get it to work on Solaris):

env['PLATFORM'] = 'posix'

(it should be directly below the line that says env.Append(LIBS=’m’) in the sunos if statement)

cd serf-1.3.7
vi SConstruct   (edit as above noted)
scons APR=/opt/sungeek APU=/opt/sungeek OPENSSL=/usr PREFIX=/opt/sungeek CC=/usr/sfw/bin/gcc CFLAGS=-D__EXTENSIONS__
scons install

The CC and CFLAGS needs to be set otherwise it will try to use CC and will give you some errors about APR_PATH_MAX.

 

Subversion

cd subversion-1.8.10
export CFLAGS=-D__EXTENSIONS__
./configure --prefix=/opt/sungeek --with-apr=/opt/sungeek --with-apr-util=/opt/sungeek --with-serf=/opt/sungeek --with-apxs=/opt/svnweb/bin --with-openssl --with-sqlite=/opt/sungeek
make
make install
cd /opt/sungeek/libexec
cp mod* /opt/svnweb/modules

Next edit the httpd.conf and add the “LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so” line after the rewrite_module line.

At the bottom of the httpd.conf add the following: (assuming that /svn is the location of your svn repository.)

<Location /svn/repos>
DAV svn
SVNPath /svn>
</Location>

Then change the User/Group from daemon to webservd. Also make sure to change the file systems permissions on /svn to be owned by webservd:webservd.

 

swig-py

cd subversion-1.8.10
make swig-py
make install-swig-py
echo /opt/sungeek/lib/svn-python > /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/subversion.pth

 

ViewVC

 
cd viewvc-1.1.22
./viewvc-install

Installation path: /opt/sungeek/viewvc-1.1.22
DESTDIR path: empth

Edit the /opt/sungeek/viewvc-1.1.22/viewvc.conf and change the following:
svn_roots = svnrepos: /svn
default_root = svn_roots
mime_types_files = /opt/svnweb/conf/mime.types
diff = /opt/sungeek/bin/diff

 

Next copy the files form /opt/sungeek/viewvc-1.1.22/bin/cgi/*.cgi to /opt/svnweb/cgi-bin

Add the following to the bottom of the httpd.conf

<Directory /opt/sungeek/viewvc-1.1.22>
Order Allow, Deny
Allow from All
</Directory>

diffutils

cd diffutils-3.2
./configure --prefix=/opt/sungeek
make
make install

 

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So you want to be an IT Superstar?

Today is one of those days that I have to wonder why I took a career in Information Technology (IT)… You see, I have been doing IT for almost 20 years now and it is not like how the commercials on ITT Tech, or any of those other “tech” trade schools. The commercials make it look like it is just a easy 9 to 5 job, where everything is so cool and collect.

What I am going to tell you is it is the exact opposite. You will work all types of hours, some times days on end with out sleep when something dies. You will have unrealistic expectations assigned to your projects by people who more than likely have never even touched a computer or know how anything works on it, other than to send an email or do an Excel spread sheet. You will also probably give up one weekend a month for the famous “patching day” which can be at any time your management decides they want to be. And because they love to do it, it is usually at like 1AM on a sunday morning, which means you lose the entire weekend because you are trying to get sleep and rested up to work that one 8 hour shift that is not your normal work time.

Once you get past all that stuff, unless you are eager to learn on your own time, you can probably kiss any further training to the sky. In the days now of tight budgets and very high work loads, your best bet at training is some computer based training of “what’s new in Windows 7”, or something totally unrelated to your actual job.

So now that we have talked about that, what provoked me to say this stuff? Well one company, Microsoft. Today was one of those days where I needed to patch some Windows 2008 Servers because of the monthly release of “security” patches because Microsoft and other vendors are in this mode of getting shit out as fast as possible and not checking the code. So as normal, I approved the 7 or 8 patches for the July cycle in WSUS, so far so good. The part that blows is that the patches applied and the servers said, hey I need to reboot. This was no big surprise because how often have you applied a Windows patch and not had to reboot? So off to reboot the servers, and this is where this shit hit the fan. All of the sudden the server went in to a boot loop. In the off chance that you can catch the blue screen of death in the fraction of a second that it was on the screen, you would see that it mentioned something about an error 0x000007b and that you may have a virus.

Well, I can guarantee you that the machines don’t have virus’ on them. So investigating the error further it appears that the 0x7b is an error that says that the OS can’t find the hard drive. Which is ironic because it has booted off of it to get that far. This then starts the oh-shit moment. Luckily this was only 1 of 2 Active Directory servers. I spent a while trying to get it to boot buy following all these different articles. To no avail I could not get it to boot up.

The biggest thing that pissed me off was Microsoft used to have a boot mode where you could step through each driver as it was loading and say whether to load it or not. Unfortunately, I can’t find that any where in the F8 menu or any of the other google foo searches. So I tried each of the safe mode options, which each BSoD. I tried Debug Mode, BSoD. I tried to have it log the startup to the ntbtlog.txt, nope, doesn’t even write to it. So now I am extremely pissed, to the point where I just said F@#K it, and started a reinstall of Windows 2008R2 (the environment this was in I could do it). But before I did it I tested the other AD server, yup, it bit the dust too.

Luckily reinstalling W2K8 doesn’t take terribly long. �However it is a pain in the ass getting an entire environment set back up because one patch blew up your servers. So while I was reinstalling these two servers, I decided to test another less critical server on a different network. Guess what it died too with the same error. So now I am thinking about how bad this could have been if I were doing some heavily used servers. �(Once again this stuff isn’t shown in the “tech school” commercials.)

So how do you go forward from this, well there are 2 different type of “tech” people. Those who go home, and start testing every single possibility in their own private lab. Then there are those who don’t give a F and wait for other people to fix their problems as they don’t have the first clue how to fix stuff if a reboot doesn’t fix it.

Can you guess which type of a tech person I am? If you guessed the former, you are correct. First thing I did when I got home from work is created a new W2K8R2 VM and started the OS installing and trying to get it up to the patch level I had the machines at work. But because this is windows that takes FOREVER with all the reboots and waiting for it to “see” the patches offered to it.

The group in the later (those who don’t care and wait for others to fix it) really start to make me mad now days. Now I can say that I spend a lot of my own free time doing a lot of stuff to teach my self practically everything I know about IT, as when I went through school, none of this stuff was taught (Shit, I am a UNIX person, but bought a Microsoft TechNet subscription just to learn as much as I can about Windows Server, etc). But some “IT” people seem to get pissed when I make the notion that they need to learn this stuff on their own at home. It is almost the “how dare you ask me to do something on my free time to better my self when I can sit here and do nothing.” Well that is the only way you are going to better your self, and learn from your mistakes with out affecting something at your work that may affect something with your pay …

 

As I said at the beginning I have been doing IT for close to 20 years now. In that time I have had my hands on the following:

  • Every version of SunOS/Solaris from 4.1.1 up to the current (11)
  • Every version of Microsoft Windows from 3.11 through Server 2012
  • IBM AIX 3.1.2 through 6
  • VM/ESA
  • OpenVMS
  • SGI IRIX
  • Various distributions of Linux (and this is one of my huge pet peeves, but that is for another post)
  • Every version of MacOS from 7 through the current 10.9
  • Practically every version of VMware from the original VMware workstation 1.0 on Linux, to vSphere 5.1 to VMware fusion 6.
  • BeOS
  • OS2/Warp
  • Novell Netware

And that is just Operating systems, some of which don’t even exist any more. The hardware side is so numerous that is hard to even keep track of, but lets just say I got in to computers when an 80286 8MHz was considered fast and bleeding edge, not to mention a Commodore 64, and Atari 800.

 

So what is the moral of this post? Really think if you want to get in to IT, and do you have the thirst for learning and teaching yourself. If you don’t have that and don’t want to spend some times hours a night learning how stuff works, or if spending an entire weekend at work on a nice summer day doing patches is not your thing, please don’t take that type of job. IT is almost like a dedication and devotion, if you don’t have the time to do it, you probably shouldn’t start it.

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New server

So the server that I bought back in April of 2006 to host this site died Wednesday September 18th, 2013.. I am not sure exactly what happened, �but found it unresponsive around 22:00. I went over to where it was hosted and it was still running, but the ethernet card lights were both on solid. After trying to get it to boot and show something on both the video card or the serial port for about an hour, I finally turned it off and got a screw driver out and removed it from the rack.

I had been expecting this day for a while, since the server was 7+ years old. So I brought it home and left it on the floor. The next night I tried to boot it and see if I could get in to it. No go, something was hosed in it. As soon as I plugged in the power the fans all went to 100% and no output on the video again. Great… So I pulled one of the drives out, and attached it to a SATA/USB adapter and mounted it to a Solaris VM on my Mac. Awesome, all the data was still there. After spending close to 8 hours copying the data off, there was a hunt for a new place to host my site.

The three “ideas” I had were the following:

  1. Joyent – They run servers running SmartOS (nee Solaris). So this would be my primary choice, cause hey, I love Solaris, and really hate Linux.
  2. Amazon Web Services – They only support Linux and Windows. So I would have to switch to Linux or Windows (not really wanting to do that)
  3. Host it at home and upgrade my cable modem to a business class one.

 

So I set out to look at the cost. Both the Joyent and AWS were pretty close for the “same” amount of “hardware”. Comcast Business class was going to be WAY more than hosting it some place else.. Now it was between Joyent and AWS.

Free Trials Away….

Amazon Web Services will let you use a one of their “micro” instances for free for a year. So I decided to set one up and see how it would go. I chose to do a SUSE Linux instances, since they didn’t support Solaris. About 15 minutes after clicking the “go” button, I had a SUSE “VM” on the Internet and root access to it.

While the Amazon VM was being provisioned I went to Joyent.com and decided to sign up for one of their free 2 month trials. Unfortunately it wasn’t as smooth as the Amazon sign up. While doing the registration process, it requires a phone to call to give you a PIN number to type in to finish the registration (I assume to stop hackers from spawning machines automagically). Well I put in the phone number and it called, but it only rang barely once and then hung up. It then changed the status page to an “invalid account” and locked it so I couldn’t do anything.

I tried calling them, and they said I had to submit a support request through the Internet. I did and some emails went back and forth, and then it was time to go to bed. The next day I received an email saying that the account had been updated and to try to log in. I also received an email from an account exec asking how it was going. (More than I received from Amazon…)

After work I logged in and tried to create my first “SmartMachine”. Well that sort of failed since I had not finished the registration part the night before. So I added my CC number to the billing info, but it still would not let me create one as it said I had no billing info set… Ha! I logged out and back in and it was much better, it let me pick the size of machine I wanted to create and a way it went. About 10 minutes later I had a root account on a zone on the machine.

So the work began on trying to get my site back up and running between the AWS SUSE VM and the Joyent SmartOS Zone. Surprisingly the SmartOS machine I had picked, had Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc already installed. BUT PHP did not appear to have been compiled with MySQL support. So I just decided to do my own compilation of Apache+PHP+MySQL.

As you can see, it is all up and working now.

So here is my quick comparison of Joyent (standard 64) and AWS (micro T1) given the 1 day of use now:

  1. Easy of signing up:
    • Amazon: Pretty painless. No issues that I had to contact some one for.
    • Joyent: Minor issue, and it may not be their fault, but it did take extra time to get it fixed
  2. OS Selection:
    • Amazon: They have a variety of Linux (7 different Distro’s) and Windows (2003,2008,2012) instances. However neither would be my first choice of OS for my site. Decided on SUSE Linux in the end.
    • Joyent: They offer 3 different OS’. Linux, Windows and SmartOS. SmartOS is a fork of Solaris when it was “open sourced”. Therefore I chose SmartOS, as I would much prefer it over Linux.
  3. Speed of provisioning
    • Amazon: Roughly 15 minutes from start to when I had root access
    • Joyent: Roughly 15 minutes from start to when I had root access.
  4. Processors:
    • Amazon: 1 Processor (Intel Xeon CPU E5-2650 @ 2.00GHz)
    • Joyent: 24 Running at 2.4GHz, 1vCPU
  5. Memory:
    • Amazon: 658Mb
    • Joyent: 2GB
  6. Disk Space:
    • Amazon: 10GB
    • Joyent: 66GB
  7. Networking:
    • Amazon: 15GB out
    • Joyent: First GB out free, each additional up to 10TB is $0.120

 

Right now the cost of both of these VPS’s is roughly around $47 a month. But will see how that works out with the network costs..

I will update in a month after seeing how they both perform.