Long time lurker (2 years on list I think), first time poster.. I dealt with mod_perl on Solaris during the creation of the Chicago Police Department's mug shot database (running on twin E6800's / Oracle 9i). I was the primary author of this beast, and getting mod_perl to play nicely with everything else that was running on the box wasn't easy..
The copy of perl that comes default with Solaris is compiled with their Forte C compiler. It of course costs money, and is used by many other parts of the system. One of my sun engineers disagreed with me to uninstall all traces of this rogue copy of perl and instead forced me to work with to complete installations on one system at the same time.. Ugh. Forte is incapable of building libapreq as far as I am concerned, later versions that I did get to build weren't terribly stable (trying it right now on my old dev box shows a few tests still fail).. Besides, do you really want to pay for their compiler? It all of course can be done. Instead of getting a gcc compiled package of Perl from somewhere like sunfreeware.com, I decided it would be best to build everything from scratch. I went with Sun's package of GCC, and from there compiled Perl using the SRPM from Redhat as notes on how to build a stable instance of Perl. The main things to be concerned about with Solaris is the overall system configuration (at least, it was for me, processor affinity, shared memory, heck, we even tinkered with process priority [TS:ts_maxupri and TS:ts_maxkmdpri]...) DBD::Oracle seemed a little tricky for us at first (strange lag times, but I think veritas was getting in the way), we had a few issues early on with Apache::DBI, but once we got the "on startup" connection issues worked out things ended up being ridiculously stable (they haven't rebooted since last February I'm told).. Make sure you have the latest Oracle (or any DB for that matter) client libraries before you even download the DBD source.. (sorry, that may seem infantile to mention, but we lost a week due to an older build being loaded once..) To assist my cohorts on future builds (heh, a police joke, sorry), I wrote a simple korn shell script that would go out and install all of this stuff for them. I should probably release this, as it's fairly useful for people interested in getting mod_perl up and walking with Solaris.. Thankfully, we now have a book like "Practical mod_perl" to guide us through some of the insanity of building and installing mod_perl. Thanks Mr. Bekman. (I'm a big fan of mod_perl cookbook as well, if anyone is looking for other good reading material).. In the end, do not trust Sun to package anything related to free software correctly. Most of the time it is not build for an enterprise environment, or just has really weird default path's compiled into the binary. To anyone who thinks the compiler does not matter between apache, perl, mod_perl, or ANY of the modules used by the result, they are mistaken. Symbol tables won't match, untraceable core dumps will occur at random, with incomprehensible errors. Thank the guys at Red Hat for putting the time to build decent SRPM's, so you can just copy off of their hard work ;-) .. (hmm, at the time I think I still had a copy of their internal "apache-heavy" SRPM that used as a reference, thanks Paul and Tom!) -Ryan Dietrich intelligent software solutions www.iswsolutions.com