To use multitail, is source install the best?

[actived]

Hi,
I found an excellent utility called "multitail" ( MultiTail ) and I don't know why it isnt in the base Centos repos!

It seems if you want to get it from a repo, you have to add Dag Wieers' repo.

This is probably not the preferred way for installing on a CPanel server, so the alternative method seems to be to install from source as mentioned here:
Install MultiTail for Linux « Server Guide

Is this method OK?

I personally dont think a simple utility like this could break anything.

I would also suggest that it could be made part of the additional scripts that CPanel installs, if the base Centos repos dont provide it (a simple yum search didnt show it for Centos 5.8)

Thanks in advance.
-dave

 

[cPanelTristan]

Hello Dave,

I've never heard of multitail, but it does seem to be a useful utility.

I cannot say it would harm anything, since I've never used it. I do agree installing it from source would be far more advisable than installing using an alternative repository's rpm.

Thanks!

 

[actived]

Thanks for the reply.

I have a general question about installing from source:
let's continue with the multitail example.

Once I install it - make, make install, etc., when CPanel updates the various packages which were used in building the multitail binary, like glibc, or "make" itself, do I have to recompile / reinstall in some way ?

This would mean that I have to maintain a list of packages I installed from source and then reinstall them everytime a contributing package is upgraded / updated.

Or does Linux / Cpanel keep track and automatically update it?

Or should I reinstall only if I get runtime errors that complain about incompatible versions of .so files / incomaptible API / modified / missing / mismatching headers / functions etc ?

I looked around but could not find anything about maintaining packages installed from source.

This is also important to us because we plan to use Varnish Cache - which doesn't seem to be in the list of rpm's that can be installed through WHM's interface.

Thanks in advance.
-dave

 

[cPanelTristan]

multitail likely won't experience issues on updates other than something like glibc, since make and install changes aren't even applicable once the source has been built.

As for Varnish, I cannot recommend installing it on cPanel. I've seen users who have and then Apache didn't function. We won't support Vanish in our ticketing system. If you do install it and Apache has issues working or logging to the correct domlogs, you'd need to uninstall it for our troubleshooting.