Joshua D. Boyd

Sorry, no picture this time since I was taking it to a church function.  I think that the seasoning could use some tweaking, maybe a bit less cayenne.  Also, the cooking time for me should have been closer to the smaller number listed, rather than the larger number.  The one time I did make it, I cooked it for 4 hours on high.  Next time I’d prefer to try 6-7 hours on low.

• 1 pound skinless/boneless chicken breast in 1 in. pieces
• 1 pound andouille sausage, 1 in. pieces
• 28 oz. can diced tomatoes with juice
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 large green bell pepper, chopped
• 1 cup chopped celery
• 1 cup chicken broth
• 2 tsp. dried oregano
• 2 tsp. dried parsley
• 2 tsp. Cajun seasoning)
• 1 tsp. Cayenne pepper
• 1/2 tsp. dried thyme
• 1 pound raw shrimp, peeled/deveined (frozen in a bag is fine)
• 16 oz. frozen okra
• 2 cups rice

DIRECTIONS

1. In a slow cooker, mix everything but okra and shrimp and cover.
2. Cook 7 to 8 hours on Low, or 3 to 4 hours on High.
3. Stir in okra during last hour of cook time. Stir in the shrimp during the last 30 minutes of cook time.
4. Serve with crusty baguette bread.

I guess this post will have a somewhat limited life span since Solaris Express is being retired in favor of OpenSolaris. However, some of the pages I always refereed to every time I needed to do this have disappeared, so I’m writing it up again anyway for future reference. Maybe I’ll update it again when I try out OpenSolaris finally.

This will require a Solaris 10 Solaris Express, or OpenSolaris system to be the jumpstart server, and then of course a client that you want to install Solaris Express on.

Step 1, download the Solaris Express DVD image from. Currently, a link to this image can be found here: http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/downloads

Step 2, loop back mount that image somewhere on the jumpstart server.

[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ sudo lofiadm -a sol-nv-b127-sparc-dvd.iso /dev/lofi/1
Password:
[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ sudo mount -F hsfs -o ro /dev/lofi/1 /mnt
[jdboyd@u80 ~]$

Step 3, run the install server script.

[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ cd /mnt/Solaris_11/Tools/
[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ ./setup_install_server /path/to/where/you_want_it

For /path/to/where/you_want_it, I use /export/jumpstart/Solaris_11.  At this point be prepared to wait awhile.  It doesn’t ask any questions while it works, so perhaps you can head onto the next step while still waiting.  When this completes, the install server is installed, so:

[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ sudo umount /mnt
[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ sudo lofiadm -d /dev/lofi/1

Step 4, gather the information you need from the machine to install.  You will need the MAC address, the IP address to use, the hostname to use, and the hardware type, which will probably be sun4u or sun4v.  The IP and hostname will already need to be in DNS.

Step 5, add the client to the install server.  This will use the information from step 4.

[jdboyd@u80 ~]$ cd /export/jumpstart/Solaris_11/Solaris_11/Tools/
[jdboyd@u80 Tools]$ sudo ./add_install_client -i $IP -e $MAC $HOSTNAME sun4u

Obviously, you need to substitute the $ items in the above command with the proper values.

Step 6, finally, you are ready to install on the client.  So, on the client, get to the open boot prompt, and do this:

ok boot net - install

At the point, your install proceeds normally. If you get a small stack of “Timeout waiting for ARP/RARP packet” messages right at the beginning, don’t worry. If it does it seemingly forever (say 15+ minutes), then maybe you do need to worry.

Some of this was taken from http://www.sunmanagers.org/pipermail/summaries/2005-March/006223.html

In a quest for better performance with postgres, I’ve been looking for connection pooling tools. There are a few quirks that I tend to require be met. First, it must run on Solaris. This isn’t so much a quirk, since the server runs Solaris and is SPARC hardware, and I’m not going to install a second server in colo just to accomodate software that doesn’t work on Solaris/SPARC. Additionally, I refuse to install GCC, so it must build with Sun Studio, which is much more GCC compatible that it used to be, but still isn’t GCC. Also, I want it to be reasonably simple to install and setup. I am willing to consider prebuilt packages from sunfreeware. If I get desperate enough, maybe even blastwave. Unfortunately, none of the top choices appear to be on sunfreeware.

The top choices appear to be:

• pgpool

This is the classic choice, building and install is easy, but setup is very arcane.

• pgbouncer

This looks like it should be simple to install and setup, but the configure script refuses to find my libevent install.

• SQLRelay

Works for many databases, unlike the others, including sqlite. However, it requires the rudiments library from the same author, and this library won’t build because the autoconf stuff doesn’t understand anything but GCC.

So, I haven’t broken down to checking out blastwave yet, but so far none of the normal choices are working out for PostgreSQL connection pooling.

Then, I made a small breakthrough when I found that PHP has pg_pconnect. pg_pconnect does some background bookeeping to keep connections open after you call pg_close, and return the same connection if the arguments are the same. Practically, this means that if you use a PHP system that keeps persistant php interpreters (say, mod_php in Apache, which is what I use for PHP), then you have effectively gotten connection pooling for PHP only.

This is a big help already, but I still need a solution that helps out with python.

Yes, I am working on a little web development on vacation.