Apache Web Server on Solaris 10

I downloaded Apache Web Server 2.2.9 from apache’s website and tried to compile it. At first the installer could not find cc or gcc in my path and complained (thanks to Sun, most paths don’t get added to a user’s profile when he is first created). I thought that gcc was just not there and downloaded it from sunfreeware.com and installed it. The gcc installer did not go very smoothly and i did see some errors. Either ways, I decided to proceed with the installation of Apache with the path to gcc just installed. This time the installer complained about “gcc cannot create executables”. I googled it a lot and in the end I found out that gcc DID come installed with Solaris at /usr/sfw/bin and when changing the PATH variable to point to that location, the apache installer did not complain and everything went fine with the installation.

However, the default installation does not install ssl and other modules. To do that you have to give the option –-enable-modules=”all” and  –-enable-mods-shared=”all” (in  place of “all” you can specify module names too). However, when I gave the option, it did not recognize them. I thought something wrong with my configuration. On doing some more research, I found out that this version of apache had a bug and it is not parsing the command line options properly. I am not sure if it is only on solaris or on other platforms also. Anyways, I decided to give apache version 2.2.8 a try, unzipped it and everything went smoothly with ssl and all other modules.

On enabling SSL on Apache, if you get an error from httpd-ssl.conf about “255.255.255.255″ not being able to reolve, I think it is a bug in Solaris which has perhaps been fixed in some later versions of Solaris. But for the time being, just go ahead and change the  to and Apache should be able to start properly.

smcwebserver remote access

After installing Sun Directory server, one would jump on to start cacaoadm (the common agent container administrator) using “cacaoadm start” and then would go ahead and start smcwebserver using “smcwebserver start”. One issue which I recently found is that sometimes smcwebserver does not allow remote access which means that you need to access http://hostname:6789/ on the physical host on which it is installed (a netstat -na | grep 6789 will show that it accepts connections only from 127.0.0.1, the loopback address). To resolve this issue and allow access from remote hosts issue the following 2 commands:

svccfg -s svc:/system/webconsole \setprop options/tcp_listen = true

svcadm refresh svc:/system/webconsole

Of course once this is done don’t forget to restart smcwebserver (smcwebserver restart)