Installing on SmartOS

The following steps have been tested to work with Riak version 1.2 on SmartOS version joyent_20120614T184600Z. They demonstrate installation of a Riak node on SmartOS as the root user.

Open Files Limit

Before proceeding with installation, you should ensure that the system’s open files limit is at least 65536. Check the current limits to verify this:

ulimit -a

To temporarily increase this limit for the life of your session, use the following command:

ulimit -n 65536

To increase this value in a persistent manner that will be enforced after restarting the system, add the following to /etc/system:

set rlim_fd_max=65536

Choosing a Version

SmartOS, albeit powerful, can make some easy tasks (like figuring out a “version” of SmartOS) difficult. Defining the correct version is a combination of the Global Zone snapshot version and the pkgsrc version in the guest zones. Here is the way to determine which Riak package to use.

The thing that really matters for Riak is what dataset was used to make the SmartOS VM. These datasets come from joyent and appear like this with the dsadm command:

fdea06b0-3f24-11e2-ac50-0b645575ce9d smartos 2012-12-05 sdc:sdc:base64:1.8.4
f4c23828-7981-11e1-912f-8b6d67c68076 smartos 2012-03-29 sdc:sdc:smartos64:1.6.1

This is where the 1.6 and 1.8 versions come from in the package naming. It isn’t perfect, but if you know what dataset you used to make your SmartOS VM, you will know which package to use.

For Joyent Cloud users who don’t know what dataset was used, in the guest zone type:

cat /opt/local/etc/pkgin/repositories.conf

If this returns http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/sdc6/2012Q2/x86_64/All or any other 2012Q2 you need to use the 1.8 download.
If this returns http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/sdc6/2011Q4/x86_64/All or any other 2011 you need to use the 1.6 download.

Download and Install

Download your version of the Riak binary package for SmartOS:

curl -o /tmp/riak-2.1.3-SmartOS-x86_64.tgz http://s3.amazonaws.com/downloads.basho.com/riak/2.1/2.1.3/smartos/1.8/riak-2.1.3-SmartOS-x86_64.tgz

Next, install the package:

pkg_add /tmp/riak-2.1.3-SmartOS-x86_64.tgz

After installing the package, enable the Riak and Erlang Port Mapper Daemon (epmd) services:

svcadm -v enable -r riak

Finally, after enabling the services, check to see that they are online:

svcs -a | grep -E 'epmd|riak'

Output from the above command should resemble the following:

online    17:17:16 svc:/network/epmd:default
online    17:17:16 svc:/application/riak:default

Finally, and provided that the services are shown to be in an online state, go ahead and ping Riak:

riak ping

Pinging Riak will result in a pong response if the node is up and reachable. If the node is not up and reachable, a Node <nodename> not responding to pings error will result instead.

If all responses indicate that riak is up and running, then you have successfully installed and configured Riak as service on SmartOS.

Next Steps

Now that Riak is installed, check out Verifying a Riak Installation.