VonC's questions

I have tested hostname on several servers (RedHat, Ubuntu), and hostname -f has proven unreliable, returning sometime the short name only (as described in this question).

I can see the fqn in the aliases: hostname -a (one of the aliases is the fqn I look for), but the order of the aliases is not fixed.

Is there another way to get the fully qualified name reliably, and store it in a bash variable?

I need to install on several of our old WindowsXp workstations (only 1GB of RAM, 40GB for harddrive!) a Unix server for allowing our developers to perform some preliminary test on Unix.

Considering the different Linux distros, I decided to go with the fairly recent and very small TinyCore distribution (3.7).

But:

• On one client, the mouse is erratic (not correctly captured by the VirtualBox session).
• On all clients, I am unable to set correctly the keyboard, even after installing kmaps.tcz extension and trying to indicate in the /opt/bootlocal.sh "kmap=azerty/fr-latin9".

Do you have a valid installation process with a VirtualBox(4.0.8) for TinyCore (3.7)?

I propose one below, but you may have additional information/tweaks.

By "default path", I mean "/usr/local", or other paths managed by root ("system paths").

I have to install many application packages (by that, I mean: svn, httpd, git, perl, python, ...) on a few Linux (RedHat) or Solaris (10, in local zones) servers.

But:

• those servers manage many different applications (sometimes using different versions of svn or perl or ...)
• I am not administrator on those servers (no sudo root for me)

I tried using, for instance on Solaris, pkgadd -R to try an install pre-compiled packages in a custom path (namely within the homedir of a specific user, rather than in the normal default path of /usr/local/...), but said pre-compiled packages all comes with references to other resources in /usr/...:

A ldd /path/to/local/installed/packages will show many dependencies to system paths:

ldd /home/myuser/usr/local/git
  libz.so => /usr/local/lib/libz.so
  libiconv.so.2 => /usr/local/lib/libiconv.so.2
  libsocket.so.1 => /usr/local/libsocket.so.1
  ...

That will not do, because:

• In Solaris, I have no way to write anything on /usr which is only writable from the global zone, not from a local zone.
• In Solaris or Linux, I am not root anyway, so I cannot write anything in system path.
• I don't manage the upgrades on those servers, so if any library changes, it can potentially breaks many of my installed services.

What would you recommend to do in order to install in an isolated way different "services" on a same (Linux or Solaris) server, each one potentially requiring their own version of (perl, python, ...)?

I propose a solution below, but if you have other alternatives, I am interested.

The installation steps of a JDK6 for:

• Solaris 32 bits
• Solaris 64 bits

are quite straightforward but:

• are in two separate documents
• do not deal with local zone (container) installation
• do not address fully non-standard installation path

The answer below is a community-wiki one, meant to be edited.

Do you have any comments/remarks we all should know when installing JDK on a Solaris10 sparc server?

The challenges set by the ClearCase 7.1 installation process are multiple:

• The installation for Unix has been changed (no more './install_server' script): a unified GUI-based Java tool is used, both for Windows and Unix: the Installation Manager (IM), based on a XML configuration file: the "response file".
• If anything goes wrong, IM will erase all the installation, leaving (almost) nothing
• no Gui means silent install, but it also means you cannot record easily a response file.
• no Internet means, IM will not be able to detect updates and load them for you.

The documentation does not cover completely this scenario.
My answer below will be there (as a Community Wiki) to record what I have experienced so far regarding this process.