On 07/09/2017 01:13 PM, Stephan Wiesand wrote:
> On Jul 9, 2017, at 18:32 , Bruce Ferrell wrote:
>
>> On 07/09/2017 05:51 AM, Tru Huynh wrote:
>>> On Sun, Jul 09, 2017 at 12:03:02AM -0700, Bruce Ferrell wrote:
>>>> OK, before the flames start I KNOW it's not normal.
>>>>
>>>> Has anyone have a method to upgrade glibc beyond 2.12?
>>> I would suggest trying singularity (http://singularity.lbl.gov)
>>> and put your application of choice in a single container
>>> (http://singularity.lbl.gov/quickstart).
>> Thanks Tru, but looking at this, I'm basically spinning up a Centos/RHEL/SciLin7 "container".
> Singularity is not limited to those OSs. When it comes to using recent versions of system libraries, others may be a better choice.
>
>>   If I'm going that route, spinning up a VM is a WHOLE lot faster...
> Er, no... creating an image is faster than installing a VM, starting it is orders of magnitude faster, and on top you dont' have to configure and maintain a full system. In particular, you don't have to run systemd even if you choose EL7 or Ubuntu 16.04 as the container runtime.
>
>> And if I have to go VM to do this, I may as well do a "from scratch" (Gentoo FS etc) in the VM.
>>
>> I have yet to see a good use case for containers... Unless you need a lot of them.  Most people don't.
> Well yours is a very good use case for a Singularity container. Give it a serious try, and I'm pretty sure you won't look back to any solution you have in mind now.
>
Stephan,

I WILL take another look.  I recognized the distro agnosticisim but the how-to looked like you had to "do" a distro and that meant using the unmentionable ;)

Just for the record, I do Virtual Box and when I spin one up, I PXE boot install with a kickstart file.  Very fast now that I have it going correctly.

I can even do a mumble mumble *win-install* cough cough in about 10 minutes.... Not including MS patches, of course.

In the longer term, given the reasons I'm looking into this, what I've begun, is a reverse engineer of the application to make more tolerant of the environment.

It's the only real complete solution in it's class (and it IS very good) but over the years there have been too many incidents of this type to make the situation tolerable.