Installing OmniORB for use on the ppc405

Recently I worked through the steps necessary to automate the build of AT&T's Corba implementation OmniORB (found at http://www.uk.research.att.com/omniORB/) to support cross-compiling messaging applications for the IBM ppc-405. I've assembled a collection of scripts and documentation (tarball: ../omni-ppc405.tar.gz) to make it easy to download, compile and install OmniORB 3.04 in both a native i586 configuration and a cross-compiling ppc-405 configuration. The steps are as follows:

Install HardHat for the ppc-405. TBD.
Build gcc3.0 on top of the HardHat tools. There's a handy script for this in extra/build-ppc405-gcc3.sh which should make the process pretty painless. FIXME - give example.
Run omni-all.sh from the tarball to download, build, and install omniOrb for the i586 and the ppc405 using the hardhat tools. See the README for details. Note that you need to have sudo installed. If you can't get sudo properly set up, have a look at omni-nosudu.html (FIXME coming at some point) to see how to run 3 scripts as non-root and 2 as root to do the same thing.

Test the ORB: the second echo example

The omni-all.sh script should have built eg2_impl and eg2_clt for each of the i586 and ppc405 platforms in the echo and echo-405 subdirectories respectively.

Test the echo servant and client on the host i586 dev machine:
```
	  FIXME - example goes here
	  
```
Transfer the support tarball omnisupport.tar.gz generated from running omni-support.sh over to the remote ppc405 and untar it into the root directory there.
```
	  FIXME - example goes here
	  
```
This should setup all the stuff you need to run OmniORB clients and servants.
Transfer the echo example executables eg2_clt and eg2_impl from the echo-405 directory and mark them executable:
```
	  FIXME - example goes here
	  
```
Now test the eg2_clt on the ppc405 with the IOR from an instance of a native eg2_impl servant running on an x86. (Note: be sure your networking is set up properly on the ppc405 and x86 or this will surely act strangely. Specifically, check your /etc/hosts, /etc/hostname, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/host.conf, and /etc/nsswitch.conf. The contents of these files can conveniently be overridden for orb testing by modifying the omni-support.sh script and running it with the --netconf switch (currently unimplemented, FIXME).)
Finally, run eg2_impl on the ppc405 and try running eg2_clt on the resulting IOR from both the x86 box and the ppc405. Note: I couldn't get this to work for a while, but it turns out I just needed to be more careful in setting up my /etc/hosts and hostame on the embedded ppc. See here for the history of the struggle.

Extra Tips and Weirdness

Troubleshooting and gotchas:

OmniORB is a bit finicky about the setup of the hostname. In general, you want to make sure that running
```
	  $ ping `/bin/hostname`
	  
```
works on the servant box, and that you can ping the servant box by that name from the client box as well.
When running messaging clients on a seperate machine from the server, the hostname of the client machine (specified in /etc/hosts) should have an entry in the server's /etc/hosts file or be registered in the local DNS. Otherwise, there is a significant several second delay in making the connection to the server machine.

Created: Thursday January 3, 2002
Last modified: Tuesday January 08, 2002 18:53 PST
Steven Mueller diffusor@ugcs.caltech.edu