Installing PIKT on OpenBSD

I’m putting PIKT onto my OpenBSD machine, as a master for my other Linux machines. I’ll probably have PIKT jobs running on the master as well.

The install works fine if you just ./configure && gmake && gmake install. I stuck the sources in /usr/src. If you don’t give --prefix to configure it defaults to sticking everything under a “virtual root” in /usr/local/pikt. What I mean by “virtual root” is that you get /usr/local/pikt/bin where all the PIKT binaries are, /usr/local/pikt/var/log where logs are, etc. Note that I used gmake; install the gmake (GNU make) package. I also had to install the bison package. flex appears to have been on the system. rx is apparently an (old?) GNU regular expression library. I didn’t have to install this — and there wasn’t a package for it. I’ll try and keep the fact that I might be missing a requirement in mind if stuff starts not working as I move forward. (I don’t have gawk either. I don’t know if that’s a requirement or not.)

I’m going through the PIKT “Tutorial and Getting Started”. First note: make sure you don’t have 127.0.0.1 myhostname myhostname.mydomain in /etc/hosts (where myhostname and mydomain are your real host name and domain name) because it mucks things up. Over the years I’ve had various Linux distributions tell me that your host name shouldn’t be in there as 127.0.0.1, and various others put it in there, so I’m not real sure which is correct. However, going through the examples in the above mentioned tutorial with your host name pointed to 127.0.0.1 will cause weird things like call-backs to the master to fail. I commented mine out.

Second note: apparently it’s not safe to run piktc with a relative path. I was sitting in /usr/local/pikt/lib/configs and I tried to execute the first example’s alert with ../../bin/piktc. Lo, piktc_svc somehow decided it would be smart to try and run ../../bin/pikt to send the e-mail relating to my alert? I have no idea how this happens, but when I started piktc with an absolute path (/usr/local/pikt/bin/piktc) it works. Bizarre.