graft: Install and Configure package management

Graft is a great little tool for package management on UNIX systems such as Linux. The tool itself allows you to keep a package isolated in it’s own directory, and uses symlinks to combine them in with the rest of the operating system.

An example would be a new tool that has one binary and one shared library:

/usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0
/usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0/bin
/usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0/bin/newtool
/usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0/lib
/usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0/lib/libnewtool.so

Using the graft tool, we can install the binary and the library in with the rest of our OS using a simple command like:

graft -i /usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0

With the appropriate configuration, this would create these symlinks:

/usr/local/bin/newtool -> /usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0/bin/newtool
/usr/local/lib/libnewtool.so -> /usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0/lib/libnewtool.so

Removing these symlinks is also really simple like this:

graft -d /usr/local/PACKAGES/somenewtool-1.0

Now you can see the usefulness of this tool to remove one version, and install a new one. Anyway, let’s look at the install process for graft.

1) Setup environment

mkdir -p /usr/local/PACKAGES
mkdir -p /usr/local/PKG_BUILD
cd /usr/local/PKG_BUILD

2) Download and Install Graft

Graft can be found at: http://www.gormand.com.au/peters/tools/

wget http://www.gormand.com.au/peters/tools/graft/graft-2.4.tar.gz
tar -xvzf graft-2.4.tar.gz
cd graft-2.4
make -f Makefile.dist

edit the Makefile file and change these lines:
PACKAGEDIR = /usr/local/PACKAGES
TARGETDIR = /usr/local
PERL = /usr/bin/perl

Now let’s make it:

make
make install
/usr/local/PACKAGES/graft-2.4/bin/graft -i /usr/local/PACKAGES/graft-2.4

And that’s it! Graft is now installed (in fact we just used it to install itself!). Now to get the most out of graft, I recommend adding the line “/usr/local/lib” into your /etc/ld.so.conf file, and running “ldconfig”.

Apache 2 + FastCgi + PHP 5 compile / build

Building the three of these is fairly easy, but a bit tricky if you’re used to how it worked in previous versions of Apache or PHP.  Please note that we install everything into prefix trees and use a tool called graft to manage the versions.  If you simply install your versions into default locations, you can probably leave out anything to do with prefix=, and top_dir.  We also download all install archives into /usr/local/PKG_BUILD.

Anyway to get started, the first trick is to build Apache 2 first by itself.  Here is an example:

cd /usr/local/PKG_BUILD
tar -xvzf httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz
cd httpd-2.2.8
./configure –prefix=/usr/local/PACKAGES/httpd-2.2.8 –enable-file-cache –enable-cache –enable-deflate –enable-mime-magic –enable-expires –enable-headers –enable-version –enable-ssl –enable-http –enable-cgi –enable-rewrite –enable-so –with-ssl=/usr/local/PACKAGES/openssl-0.9.8
make
make install

This will install Apache into /usr/local/PACKAGES/httpd-2.2.8.  If you want to make some modules shared (such as how we’re going to build mod_fastcgi shortly) then you can do so by adding things like: –enable-rewrite=shared.

The first part of installing fastcgi is to download fcgi from http://www.fastcgi.com.  To install this:

cd /usr/local/PKG_BUILD
tar -xvzf fcgi-2.4.0.tar.gz
cd fcgi-2.4.0
./configure –prefix=/usr/local/PACKAGES/fcgi-2.4.0
make
make install

The next step is to download mod_fastcgi (this is a DIFFERENT package to the fcgi one).  You can also download this from http://www.fastcgi.com/

cd /usr/local/PKG_BUILD
tar -xvzf mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz
cd mod_fastcgi-2.4.6
cp Makefile.AP2 Makefile
make top_dir=/usr/local/PACKAGES/httpd-2.2.8/
make install top_dir=/usr/local/PACKAGES/httpd-2.2.8/

This will actually find your httpd source and compile mod_fastcgi for you, as well as install it with the Apache 2 modules! (Easy huh?).

The final step is to download and install PHP 5.  You can obtain PHP from http://www.php.net.  After downloading:

cd /usr/local/PKG_BUILD
tar -xvzf php-5.2.4.tar.gz
cd php-5.2.4

Now the next part will no doubt differ depending upon what features you want to compile PHP with.  That’s left up to you and google to work out how to compile the other modules.  I’ll show what we compile some of our systems with, but the only ones that are really applicable to this blog are the –enable-force-cgi-redirect –enable-fastcgi ones.

./configure  –prefix=/usr/local/PACKAGES/php-5.2.4-norm –with-openssl=/usr/local/PACKAGES/openssl-0.9.8d –with-zlib –enable-force-cgi-redirect –enable-fastcgi –with-mysql=/usr/local/PACKAGES/mysql-5.0.41 –enable-static –with-config-file-path=/etc/php.ini –with-imap –with-mcrypt –with-curl=/usr/local/PACKAGES/curl-7.16.1/ –with-kerberos –with-imap-ssl
make
make install

And that’s it for the compiling stage.  I’ll put up a blog at a later date on how to configure Apache 2 to work with FastCgi.  Stay tuned.

php_network_getaddresses failed

We came across a problem today which we have seen a few times before. They were attempting to install wordpress akismet and when attempting to verify their API key they would always receive the following error:

There was a problem connecting to the Akismet server

This rather trivial message in this instance, and in other instances has been due to a badly set up chroot environment. The actual PHP error being generated is this one:

Warning: fsockopen(): php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known

Which simply means that it could not resolve the hostname into an IP address in this instance. There is talk over at PHP bugs about it in which it has been repeated many times that this is NOT a PHP bug! Unfortunately people tend not to read before they post….

Anyway, the important files that you are going to need to make sure are in your chroot environment (with appropriate permissions) to resolve this problem are:

/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/hosts
/etc/nsswitch.conf
/etc/protocols
/etc/services
/etc/host.conf
/lib/libresolv.so.*
/lib/libnss_files.*
/lin/libnss_dns.*

And if you have any wierd and wonderful domain configuration going on, you may need other libnss files too.