Problems Deploying CouchDB to EC2 Servers
This morning Jeff is still having problems getting CouchDB deployed to our Amazon EC2 machines, and it's almost certainly due to the deployment system that's in place in The Shop. It's something I completely understand, but it's also based on the idea that you can't trust anyone. That, and it's an old RedHat-based distro that I know from experience is not as easy to deal with as something like a more recent Ubuntu.
Still, it's just the way it has to be, as that's the only way Prod Ops can deal with things, so there's no real way around it. The problem is that you need to be able to build the code on one box, and package it up - similar to an RPM or a deb package, and then deploy it across a lot of machines. All well and good, but Jeff is having a horrible time getting CouchDB 1.2.0 compiled on his build box.
There are some things he's trying, and even seeing if the other folks around here have any ideas. But the latest attempts have left something that looks like CouchDB running on the server, but when I go to add things to it, I get a nasty stack trace about 'Connection refused' after some kind of timeout. I've inserted about 1500 documents of the 2500 I need to, and it stops.
At the same time, I was able to use Homebrew to simply:
$ brew install couchdb
and then follow a few instructions about getting it to run on my login startup, and that's it. It Just Works.
I would say that this would also be the case if we were looking at standard Ubuntu boxes in EC2 or Rackspace, and using yum or apt get. The real question is why do we need to do these custom packages for Open Source software when they are so easy to just install?
Again… no way to know… no way to answer. It just is and that's it.