On a deployment I'm currently working on, I've seen two different cases of proprietary software use leading to both madness and sadness, which are just so typical that I can't resist to tell you. Keep in mind, for the rest of this reading, that the whole platform is running under Solaris 10 x86-64.<\/p>\n
The first case is a data quality management software that we will keep anonymous. The editor promised before the deployment began that they had a version of the software for the operating system that we would be using. Well, it turned out they do have a Solaris version... for sparc, and a x86-64 version... for Linux. No Solaris x86-64 version, and no way to get a rebuild in a timely fashion.<\/p>\n
The second case is a content management software that we will keep anonymous. It comes in the form of a java web application and a java application container. Part of integrating this software involves a proprietary plugin for Apache HTTPd<\/a> that acts as a mix of mod_proxy_balancer<\/a>, mod_disk_cache<\/a>, and htcacheclean<\/a>, as well as a cache invalidator.<\/p>\n Originally, the java web application was supposed to be installed within a JBoss Application Server<\/a> instead of the editor provided container, and Apache HTTPd would reverse proxy requests to the JBoss server. This means we already had an Apache HTTPd in place (latest version ; 2.2.11 at the time), and since we have x86-64 processors, it was built as a 64-bits binary.<\/p>\n Contrary to the first case, this time, we had a Solaris x86 binary. Yes, you read correctly: x86 ; 32-bits only.<\/p>\n