We're working hard at the moment on migrating unmanaged scripts and solutions into Solaris pkgadd format, a.k.a. "packages". This has a number of benefits. First, it avoids the need to have complicated manual installation routines; By including preinstall / postinstall scriptsinstallation can be automated. Second, it is easy to know what revision of a software environment is installed right down to the installation process. Third, it ensures that not only can I ensure software is installed with the ight attributes and in the right places, but also that I can validate at a later time things are still as intended using pkgchk. I refer to this as managed files vs. unmanaged files.
The easy part was packaging our custom site scripts. We standardized on a hierarchy under /opt which contained bin, man, etc, lib, and sbin subdirectories. We then inventoried the unmanaged scripts and determined which were still valid and which could be discarded. The "keepers" were then incorperated into packages which were fairly simple overall.
Phase two has been an asessment of what unmanaged files for third party applications are being deployed. We found a lot of opportunity here and decided to start with the utility software like monitoring, security, and other non-revenue generating software. Here is where we have been uncovering nothing less than a mess.
For some reason, third party software providers in the UNIX space seem determined to make it impossible to manage their files. We've seen many interesting perversons of best practices that I thought woudl be interesting to collect in one place.
One product choose to adopt a package management solution called LSM, which I believe stands for Linux Software Manager. Note that this solution is for Solaris which has a perfectly good vendor provided and supported standard for software management. It turns out to be quite a technical feat to reversen engineer the format of LSM and directly convert to packaged.
Another product did not use any software management, but went so far as to encrypt their pre-installation bundles so as to make it impossible to install via a standards-based management system. This really blew my mind. What could be of such critical intellectual property in an installation routine that it justified encryption? And wouldn't the real IP be available once the software was installed anyway?
We routinely encounter software that has highly interactive installation processes that become cumbersome to integrate into packages because on each new release the routines would need to be re-ported to pre/post install scripts. The idea of managing software is to reduce work - not increase maintenance.
The biggest thorn in our side is Oracle. It's deployed everywhere in our environment and is intalled manually each time because we're told that's just how its done, and from observation it seems to be in the PITA bucket as far as automation goes. Contrast this to PostgreSQL which as of Solaris 10 (6/06) is integrated into the Operating Environment in clean packages.
So here's a message to all you third party software developers who provide Solaris solutions: Sun publishes an excellent guide to software packaging that any reasonably technical person could use to master the process in a few hours. Let me summarize a few key points in advance:
(1) You don't need to have a conversation to install software. Just copy the files, then configure it later.
(2) Sometimes I don't want to have a conversation. Let me put the answers in a file and feed that instead.
(3) Some of your customers have too many systems to install manually.
(4) Don't use a non-standard solution when the OS vendor provides a perfectly usable solution.
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