README.solaris The following is a brief explanation of how to compile net-snmp to work successfully on Sun Solaris 2.6, 2.7, and 8 machines. This should also work for Solaris 9. First off, you need to disable Sun's SNMP daemons. cd /etc/rc3.d ./S76snmpd stop ./S88dmi stop mv S76snmpd s76snmpd (lowercase s disables the script) mv S77dmi s77dmi You will need to have installed the development libraries. If you have installed the FORTE C compiler, these are included. They are also installed if you have done a "full" or "full plus OEM" install. To confirm, type: which ld It should return /usr/ccs/bin/ld If they are not present, they can be installed from the distribution cd. If this is not available, you may want to try downloading the binutils from http://www.sunfreeware.com. You will also need to install a working compiler if you aren't using Sun's. Download gcc from http://www.sunfreeware.com. Version 2.95.3 works well but the 3.0 stream should work as well. You will also need a proper "make", which can also be downloaded from http://www.sunfreeware.com. It installs in /usr/local/bin. Because of this, you need to modify your path so it includes at least the following directories in this order /usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/usr/ucb Use the following configure calling sequence. ./configure --with-mib-modules="host disman/event-mib ucd-snmp/diskio smux agentx mibII/mta_sendmail" If you wish to have perl functionality, see my long note below. Then do the following: make make install snmpconf -g basic_setup (choose a community string besides "public") /usr/local/sbin/snmpd snmpwalk -v 2c -m ALL -t 100 -c community_string localhost .1.3 This should return pages of information about your system. Eventually you will need to make a new startup script for snmpd in /etc/rc3.d. Addition notes below are from a variety of sources concerning various technical matters. ------------------------------------------------------ Solaris has a limitation on the number of file descriptors (255) available in stdio, so that fopen() fails if more than 255 file descriptors (sockets) are open. This prevents mibs from being loaded after 250 sockets are open, since parse.c uses stdio. SEan investigated this problem, and had this report on using the SFIO package to solve this problem. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The SFIO package ( http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/sfio/ ) is a buffered streams IO package that is much more more sophisticated than stdio, but it does support stdio API's for backward compatibility, and that's the aspect that is important here. To compile with SFIO, we simply add -I/usr/local/sfio/include to the $CPPFLAGS before compiling net-snmp. This causes SFIO's stdio.h to preempt Solaris stdio, mapping calls like fopen() and fprintf() to the SFIO implementations. This produces a libnetsnmp that does not have the fopen() limitation. Any application that links to this libnetsnmp must also be linked to libsfio. Here are the two caveats: 1. libsfio exports the functions 'getc' and 'putc', for reasons that are not clear. These are the only symbols it exports that conflict with stdio. While getc and putc are traditionally macros, Solaris makes them functions in multithreaded code (compiled with -mt, -pthread, or -D_REENTRANT). If your native stdio code links to the libsfio versions, a crash will result. There are two solutions to this problem. You may remove getc and putc from libsfio, since SFIO defines getc and putc as macros, by doing: ar d libsfio.a getc.o ar d libsfio.a putc.o or link to SFIO's stdio compatibility library, libstdio, ahead of libsfio. This library wraps all of the native stdio calls with versions that are safe for native or sfio streams, in case you need to share streams between SFIO and native stdio codes. 2. libsfio provides 64-bit offsets in fseek(), ftell(). This is a good thing, since SFIO is intened to avoid needless limitations, but it means that SFIO's stdio.h defines off_t to be a 64-bit offset. Net-SNMP uses readdir(), which returns a struct dirent containing a 32-bit off_t, so the code compiled for SFIO doesn't access struct dirent's correctly. There are two solutions to this problem, as well. The first is to include at the start of SFIO's stdio.h. Since SFIO defines a macro substitution for off_t, this leaves struct dirent's definition unchanged. An alternative, which I haven't verified, is to define _FILE_OFFSET_BITS to be 64 when compiling libnetsnmp. According to what I see in Solaris's /usr/include/sys/feature_tests.h, you can select a 64-bit off_t at compile time with this setting, which should make readdir()'s off_t compatible with SFIO's ftell(), fseek(). [[ We have received reports that this approach does not in fact work ]] Finally, thanks to Phong Vo and AT&T Labs for a fast, robust and portable package that solves this headache very neatly. -SEan ------------------------------------------------------------ Solaris 8 ships with a version of PERL compiled using sun's cc. This causes a problem when attempting to compile net-snmp with the new PERL functionality ie. ./configure --with-mib-modules="host disman/event-mib ucd-snmp/diskio smux agentx mibII/mta_sendmail" --enable-shared --enable-embedded-perl because during the PERL section of the compile, it attempts to do so using the methodology used to compile the original PERL, not what you're currently using. This can be discovered by typing perl -V and it says (among other things) Compiler: cc='cc' and you don't have the full version of Sun's C compiler on your system, it's going to break. If you have downloaded the PERL on www.sunfreeware.com, it is compiled with some extra flags that cause the net-snmp compile to break. Given that the PERL provided with Solaris 8 (5.005_03) is rather stale, upgrading may be to your advantage. Download the current stable release of PERL http://www.cpan.org/src/stable.tar.gz and gunzip and untar. When doing the PERL ./Configure, accept most of the defaults, except for the following: Use which C compiler? [cc] gcc (it tends to default to cc even if not installed) Any additional gcc flags? [-fno-strict-aliasing -I/usr/local/include] (if there are any additional flags, especially relating to 64 offsets, remove these) What command should be used to create dynamic libraries? [cc] gcc Any special flags to pass to gcc to create a dynamically loaded library? [-G -L/usr/local/lib] (There shouldn't be anything extra here (see above)) Any special flags to pass to gcc to use dynamic linking? [none] (There shouldn't be anything extra here either (see above)) What is your domain name? [.foo.com] (it may guess wrong) What pager is used on your system? [/bin/less] /usr/bin/more (It wants less even if it's not installed) It will prompt you for make depend, then do: make make test make install perl -V if everything looks all right, do the net-snmp ./configure (don't forget to make clean if necessary) -- Bruce Shaw ------------------------------------------------------------ The version of sed in /usr/ucb on Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6 can't cope with the size of the subsitution strings used in config.status. Putting /usr/bin ahead of /usr/ucb in the search path fixes this. /usr/xpg4/bin/sed is seen to segfault under Solaris 8 when running configure. Putting /usr/bin ahead of /usr/xpg4/bin fixes this. Thanks to zach dot metzinger at removeme microtune dot com.