miceda

I’ve been itching to try out Scalaris since it hit Google code. Well, I finally got the chance today. Why am I so excited about it? Two reasons: 1) I’ve been playing with my own Erlang version of Amazon SQS I built and would like to see if I can take it to the next level with Scalaris. 2) I’m sure there’s something I can learn from the code; IMO studying quality open-source code is one of the best learning resources.

So first I need to get things running. The only difficult part of the install is the rrdtool requirement. I haven’t used rrdtools before (but I may now…looks useful for some work I’m doing) so I need to install it on my Mac. I tried building from source but quickly found I was missing a bunch of dependencies. So I decided to try macports. It did the trick and made life a bit easier. So assuming you have macports installed, here’s what it took for me to install rrdtool:

Building on Mac OS X 10.5

1. sudo port install gettext
2. sudo port install pango
3. sudo port install rrdtool

This took awhile but worked! Now the easy part: just follow the README in the scalaris source. The build went without a hitch!

Once things were installed, I followed the instructions and created a scalaris.local.cfg and fired up the boot server and 2 nodes.

Here are few screen shots:

I ran into problem on the home screen when I tried to enter a key in the form of a URL. YAWS crashed but of course restarted itself. Not sure what all the other screens are telling me yet… so it’s time to dig into the code.

Update…
It’s not a URL that crashes YAWs, it simply data validation. If a field is missing when the HTML form is submitted it causes the error above. So the problem really has nothing to do with Scalaris. I’ve submitted a small patch to the Scalaris team that fixes the problem.