I spent most of the day getting crap installed on the first blade as well as learning about little quirks with SuSE Linux Enterprise 9.3.

MySQL 5.0.21 was an easy install (a nice little RPM for SuSE Linux comes from MySQL).

Memcached was a pretty easy compile/install… just needed to compile/install eventlib first.

The big bitch was getting PHP 5.1.4 compiled and working properly with all the options I wanted (had to install all sorts of secondary stuff that PHP had dependencies on [and then a lot of those things had their own dependencies that needed to be resolved]) and compiled a couple dynamic extensions for it (eAccelerator and Memcache). Most of the problems with the configure script not being able to find libraries it needed was solved with the –with-libdir=lib64 parameter.

I really hope that once the first blade is setup exactly how I want it, I can use the hardware RAID mirroring to just swap out one of the drives into another blade and rebuild the mirrors (and repeat for each blade)… then just set a unique IP address and hostname for each blade/server.

I still need to code some stuff to keep some of the files in sync properly (for example each web server should mirror content on each blade), but I’ll do that next week I guess.

Once the blades are all configured and ready to go, I can do some of the more fun stuff… like setting up the load balancers. I think I’m going to use the load balancers for both web and database connections for both load balancing and fault tolerance. So much good dorky fun!