Arches and CentOS?

[Bryan Alvey]

Hello Everyone,

We are looking to move Arches (5.x) onto a new server and a restriction has been placed on us, so we looking to see if anyone else in the Arches community is using Arches with CentOS.

We have searched the internet for Arches and CentOS and got a couple of returns, including some Arches documentation on GitHub for installing Arches and its dependencies on CentOS for 4.3.1. This seems to be the latest reference for installing Arches on CentOS; but of course Arches has changed a lot since that time, and its dependencies have changed too.

Is there anyone out there who has Arches installed on a server running CentOS? If so, what version are you using? Would you be willing to share your experiences of it with us, and perhaps even supply a script for the installation of Arches or at least its dependencies for CentOS?

Your replies may influence our decision on the way forward: we would like to bring our VM in-house on a much better spec and have the support of our organisation’s IT team looking after our data; but if the drive is to use Ubuntu only, then we would look for other alternatives.

Best wishes,

Bryan Alvey

[christop...@historicengland.org.uk]

Hi Bryan,

Hope you're well. I think we may have met a while back, in London. I'm not in the dev or hosting side of things, and we run Windows here at HE, so unfortunately I can't help with the particular point you've raised!

I'm not sure if your IT team is aware - I guess they may be - but there is a change of focus within the CentOS project, and instead of being an open source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it will in the future be the development version of RHEL, which may make it less suitable for production use: https://blog.centos.org/2020/12/future-is-centos-stream/

Anyhow, hopefully someone else can help with the specifics of hosting on CentOS.

Best wishes,

Chris Dolby

Project Manager
Historic England

[andrew...@historicengland.org.uk]

Again, to add to what Chris said, we run on Windows rather than CentOS and have struggles with some supporting Arches dependencies that only do "best endeavours" on our particular OS.  Our IT team will only support Windows machines/network so we have a similar challenge.

Because of this, we are looking more at running in containers, which allow us to either run in Ubuntu on top of Windows, or more likely, deploy to a cloud container service (Azure Kubernetes Service in our case). Some in the community are also progressing in this direction - certainly on Kubernetes.

Hopefully this will allow the IT team to support Azure resource up to the load balancer and then our team will ensure the deployments, services etc. within the AKS cluster are correctly configured. This will mean an element of burden lands with the developers but it should be a worthwhile compromise.

[Brett Ferguson]

Hi Bryan -

I'm currently running an Arches 5.1.1 development environment in a CentOS 7.8.2003 VirtualBox VM on OSX. I found the install much easier than Arches 4.3 on the same OS. Once the system requirements were installed, the Arches install was pretty seamless using the instructions in the Arches Installation Guide.

I ran into a couple of issues with multiple versions of GDAL existing on the VM, and needing to install the the postgresql11 libraries as a requirement for the libpqxx package even though I'm running postgresql 12 database, but other than that it was a pretty smooth process.

It's very early days working with this version of Arches so I don't have repeatable install script in my dev environment yet, however if you're interested I could provide you with a list of the installed yum packages that is (at least so far) a working configuration.

Brett