It’s been the year of the no-sql distributed databases for me. Technically, it started a few years back when I discovered the ELK stack, but this year I found myself evaluating many more of these distributed databases for an exciting project at my workplace. A few months back I started playing with Apache Cassandra and was really impressed with it’s capabilities. However, I since switched my focus to evaluate a new kid on the block (or should I say block chain?) called bigchaindb which may be more suited to the requirements of our project.
Since we are mostly a RedHat shop, I decided to try and get this running on the latest CentOS 7. This application has a few requirements:
- RethinkDB
- Python 3.4+
- OpenSSL ==with ECC==
RethinkDB is fairly simple to install and Python 3.4 is available on the epel repo. However, openssl on CentOS 7 only ships with these three ECC curves compiled in:
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ openssl ecparam -list_curves
secp384r1 : NIST/SECG curve over a 384 bit prime field
secp521r1 : NIST/SECG curve over a 521 bit prime field
prime256v1: X9.62/SECG curve over a 256 bit prime field
In order to get more ECC curves, we are going to have to compile openssl from source. To preserve the current default openssl installation on this OS, I will be compiling it, then placing it to a non-standard location. I consider this a safer approach then just replacing what we already have installed. So let’s get started:
# Download source and compile
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ yum -y install gcc
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ mkdir -p /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/build; cd /opt/openssl-1.0.1s
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s $ wget https://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.1s.tar.gz
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s $ tar xzvf openssl-1.0.1s.tar.gz
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s $ mv openssl-1.0.1s src; cd src
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/src $ export CFLAGS="-fPIC"
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/src $ ./config --prefix=/opt/openssl-1.0.1s/build shared enable-ec enable-ecdh enable-ecdsa
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/src $ make all
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/src $ make install
# Check if we got more curves
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/src $ openssl ecparam -list_curves | wc -l
3
root@c7-dev3 /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/src $ /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/build/bin/openssl ecparam -list_curves | wc -l
73
Alright, now that we got the openssl curves we needed, we can continue installing the rest:
# Install RethinkDB
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ wget https://download.rethinkdb.com/centos/6/`uname -m`/rethinkdb.repo -O /etc/yum.repos.d/rethinkdb.repo
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ yum -y install rethinkdb
# Install python 3.4 and some other deps
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ yum -y install epel-release
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ yum -y install libffi-devel gcc-c++ redhat-rpm-config python34-devel
# Install pip
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py | python3.4
# Install bigchain and specify the openssl headers and libraries
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ CFLAGS='-I /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/src/include' LDFLAGS='-L /opt/openssl-1.0.1s/build/lib -Wl,-rpath=/opt/openssl-1.0.1s/build/lib' pip --no-cache-dir install bigchaindb
# start rethinkdb & bigchaindb
root@c7-dev3 ~ $ rethinkdb --daemon && bigchaindb start