Django on Accelerators

We’ve setup two clients plus ourselves on TextDrive Accelerators. For those not in the know, TextDrive Accelerators are Sun Solaris Zone Containers—think of a VPS, but faster, OpenSolaris instead of Linux or BSD, and with SAN storage on Thumpers. We run a fairly standard setup on the first client’s box using Apache, MySQL and PHP. The second client and ourselves use Django so we’ve also had to install mod_python on the box. Fortunately, setting up Django and mod_python on an Acclerator couldn’t be easier.

The only downside is that Blastwave, the free-as-in-speech software manager for Solaris only has Python 2.3. The package maintainer had expressed interest in updating the packages in October, but nothing has become available.

Anyone could build Python 2.4+ and mod_python to go with it, but the setup above works well and will be updated with the rest of the packages. It’s also fairly easy to make Python code backwards compatible with 2.3. As a matter of fact, we wrote our site without this consideration and yet we didn’t have to do any porting. It just worked.

Oh yeah—when we reboot it takes less than 10 seconds.