We have some Sun T1000’s running Solaris 10 that we are going to deploy as web servers. By compiling Apache from source using the Sun Studio compilers, you get a huge boost in performance because of the compiler’s built-in optimizations for the Niagra processor. Before deploying them, I needed to get NRPE setup, which requires that the Nagios plugins be installed. Once setup on the client side, I can point our Nagios server at the webserver and get notified of hardware issues, disk usage, load averages and what not. Installing NRPE and the plugins using gcc is a no brainer. I thought using Sun Studio wouldn’t be too much harder, but after 5 hours of banging my head against the wall, I figured out how to make them compile… To compile the two, first set your PATH variable so that it can find Sun Studio, and the Sun make binary:

PATH=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/local/ssl/bin/
PATH=$PATH:/usr/ucb
export PATH

Now, the tricky part. Everything I did was failing with SSL issues. Once I fixed that, check_procs wasn’t working properly. Turns out you need to set some CFLAGS and tell configure how to run ps:

CFLAGS='-DSSL_EXPERIMENTAL -DSSL_ENGINE -xO4' ./configure --with-ps-command="/usr/bin/ps -eo 's uid pid ppid vsz rss pcpu etime comm args'" --with-ps-format='%s %d %d %d %d %d %f %s %s %n' --with-ps-cols=10 --with-ps-varlist='procstat,&;procuid,&;procpid,&;procppid,&;procvsz,&;procrss,&;procpcpu,procetime,procprog,&pos;'

Then make, su, make install as usual. Wash, rinse, and repeat for NRPE.