opensolaris

If your zone is not booting...

2009-10-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

It happened more than once to find a zone in inconsistent status, reverting to maintenance mode.
Console showing following messages...

Use is subject to license terms.

Oct 17 18:13:58 svc.startd[21223]: Requested milestone "svc:/milestone/multi-user:default" not in repository. Reverting to "all".

Requesting System Maintenance Mode

(See /lib/svc/share/README for more information.)

Console login service(s) cannot run

Root password for system maintenance (control-d to bypass):

NEVER forget that even if the zone is using the global Kernel, it behaves as if it was a normal [open]solaris machine, so let's try this way

-zlogin boot -m milestone=none

once up restore SMF repository

/lib/svc/bin/restore_repository

zone will reboot at the end of this procedure and you'll be safe!

Of course, if last working repository is too old, you will maybe need to recover manually some services or just take a good repository from backup..

Have a nice JOB

useful tips (1st edition)

2009-09-24T02:41:00.000-07:00

today I'd like to start sharing with you some common tricks you'll maybe need in case of problems...
quite easy, but many Solaris users/administrators don't know yet, solaris/opensolaris is affected by an annoying issue: slow shutdown/reboot

before starting going crazy, check if webconsole is online or somewhat degraded
it's a service managed by SMF
these commands will help you

1- /usr/webconsole/share/private/bin/wcremove -i default
2- svcadm clear webconsole:console
3- svcadm disable webconsole:console


Hope this helps!

keep safe your data with zfs redundancy

2009-08-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

ZFS will save you a lot of time of recovering data if you cann afford at least a spare 2nd hard disk drive
A 5 commands procedure done after installing deserves the dedicated time..

1. Install Opensolaris to to the 1st disk (c0d0s0).

2. Format the 2nd disk (c0d1s0) properly:
host:# format
(choose fdisk and create a Solaris partition on the whole disk)

3. Copy vtoc from disk 1 to disk 2 (be sure both have the same geometry):
host:# prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c0d0s2 | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c0d1s2
(NOTE: s2! on BOTH Disks)

4. Attach the 2nd disk to the Rpool:
host:# zpool attach -f rpool c0d0s0 c0d1s0

5. Install Grub on the secondary disk:
host:# installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0d1s0

PD.if you are running solaris on a scsi controller, your disks will have an identifier like c0t0d0s2 (so an extra "t0" between c and d. It cold also be t1 or whatever, according to the position occupied by the disk on the controller)

gsa-t50l issues...

2009-08-14T09:15:00.000-07:00

This article is not exactly related to solaris, but could be useful for users that would like to move to the opensource and are going crazy because of a strange issue with gsa-t50l dvd from LG/hitachi

I started with this problem since the first day I bought my laptop ( asus m51va )
but stupidly I thought I would be able to repair it...so after 6 months I became bored and sent to repair
problem was present with all OS I tried:
-win vista (sorry for naming it): after playing a dvd for 1 hour, the dvd device disappeared from "my pc" directory and the only solution was to power-off the pc
-linux/solaris: same issue, but even faster to show-up. softened by changing in bios the controller mode from sata to ide compatible...but why have I paid for a sata controller if I cannot use it?
and in addition, problem is not completely disappeared

support service from asus give me back the pc with a new cdrom drive, but problem still appears...
I tried to obtain my money back according to the spanish warranty law...but you know that laws are just done for us (stupid people believing in ideals) to shut our mouth...
no money back..if you want, send the pc back to repair (one more month without it)
what do they think I bought a pc for?
just to miss him and write him letters for its return trip from support?

almost desperate when I found this wonderful link (in russian):
http://www.forum.asus.ru/viewtopic.php?t=37228&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15&sid=e0835c68687aeb27a1a7a232696105fc

that mentioned my dvd rom and contained another link to download a new firmware

http://depositfiles.com/files/jj0xikshn

the new firmware is SR07, and is valid for dvd having SR04 on them
patch is for windows

even if the risk was losing the warranty, I tried the patch and my dvd upgraded to SR07

I FORGOT MY PROBLEM AFTER UPGRADE

here's an output with new informations collected on linux os
# hdparm -i /dev/scd0

/dev/scd0:

Model=HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-T50L , FwRev=SR07

a big thanks to russian people
a negative vote for asus support (why they don't recognize there is a problem and put this firmware for download on their page?)
negative vote for dvd support too (neither lg/hitachi put the firmware for download)

HP uploaded a patch longtime ago for this dvd, but is only working on hp laptops...

I have to admit that in the future I'll go back buying HP

IPMP from the series "all ways go to Rome"

2009-07-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

IPMP is a feature from Solaris, standing for Internet multipathing and it will allows you to stay connected all the time, without any network breaks..
Of course, if your pc has more than one network interfaces on it.
Let's figure out you have two intel gigabit interfaces handled by driver e1000g
If interfaces are called e1000g0 and e1000g1, you need to edit hostname. files for both interfaces.
They will look like these ones

/etc/hostname.e1000g0
------------------
192.168.0.2 netmask + broadcast + group ipmp0 up \
addif 192.168.0.3 deprecated -failover netmask + broadcast + up

/etc/hostname.e1000g1
------------------
192.168.0.4 deprecated -failover netmask + broadcast + group ipmp0 up

ifconfig output:
----------------
e1000g0: flags=9040843 mtu 1500 index 3
inet 192.168.0.2 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
groupname ipmp0
ether
e1000g0:1:
flags=1000843
mtu 1500 index 3
inet 192.168.0.3 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
e1000g1:
flags=9040843
mtu 1500 index 4
inet 192.168.0.4 netmask ffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
groupname ipmp0
ether

After editing the files you have to reboot in order for the system to load the configuration.
This way, both interfaces will be used for load balancing and failover, improving bandwidth.
If you just intend to have redundant interfaces, just add the "standby" flag to the secondary interfaces (e1000g1 in the example)

To be more precise, interface e1000g0:1 is a virtual one, built on top of e1000g0.
It is not used for network traffic (see deprecated flag), but is in charge of testing the link status.
It sends ping to the default router (or to the multicast 224.0.0.1 in case of defaultrouter missing). If ping won't come back, it will notify mpathd daemon to move the ip of the e1000g0 interface to the e1000g1, creating a virtual interface e1000g1:1 with its IP address.

Your downloads will never stop!

Time Slider: killer application

2009-06-28T11:04:00.000-07:00

Have you ever dreamt about a magic trick that allows you to recover this file you deleted just yesterday from Windows trash and actually you need today?
Stop awake night, stop desesperation
Your daughter won't disturb you anymore crying for her homework just lost and you will have no more issues with your boss
Move to opensolaris, and take constant snapshots of your systems, allowing you to recover even just one file to the status it was in a precise moment

A demo at
http://mediacast.sun.com/users/Erwann/media/ts-screencast.flv/details#share-wrapper

how tu run Windows applications on Opensolaris

2009-06-28T03:41:00.000-07:00

No guarantees that your apps will work with it, but Wine could give you a hand if you absolutely need that old applications you used on Windows and you can do without on OS.

I'm writing a brief guide as a variation is needed compared to the "official" guide on opensolaris.org

you can read it at
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/desktop/communities/wine/

and here is where you need to modify something..

>>Wine Packages for OpenSolaris
>>Make sure you install the SFElibaudioio & SFEfreetype packages as well

But without losing time in descriptions, let's go to

http://trisk.acm.jhu.edu/SFE/

and get the 3 needed packages

SFEfreetype-2.3.4-sol11-i386.pkg
SFElibaudioio-0.6.1alpha-sol11-i386.pkg
SFEwine-1.1.2-sol11-i386.pkg

(if you download it in .gz format, remember a gunzip before installing, if it is a bz2, bunzip2 )
Then, as root user, let's install them with
pkgadd -d pathwherepackageis/SFEfreetype-2.3.4-sol11-i386.pkg
pkgadd -d pathwherepackageis/SFElibaudioio-0.6.1alpha-sol11-i386.pkg

And here a forced modification to the official wiki, as you need another package, that you can install from opensolaris IPS repository with
pkg install SUNWsane-backend

Let's end up with pkgadd -d .../SFEwine-1.1.2-sol11-i386.pkg

Now download whatever .exe you need and just give from command line a
wine file.exe and it will install recreating a virtual windows path devices with needed libraries
Remember you have to do this procedure with the user owning the directory that contains the .exe

run as many solaris as you can

2009-06-25T05:23:00.000-07:00

Many of you already know that one of the biggest new feature of solaris 10 and opensolaris is the availability of "virtual machines" that share the same kernel instance
You can call this containers or zones

Let's see the process of creation
First of all we need a new fs where our zone will be seated
As opensolaris uses zfs as default fs, we do

# zfs create /zones/test (this will automatically create and mount fs /zones/test)

# zonecfg -z zone1
zone1: No such zone configured
Use 'create' to begin configuring a new zone.
zonecfg:zone1> create
zonecfg:zone1> set zonepath=/zones/test
zonecfg:zone1> set autoboot=true
zonecfg:zone1> add net
zonecfg:zone1:net> set physical=e1000g0
zonecfg:zone1:net> set address=192.168.201.121
zonecfg:zone1:net> end
zonecfg:zone1> add attr
zonecfg:zone1:attr> set name=comment
zonecfg:zone1:attr> set type=string
zonecfg:zone1:attr> set value="zone one"
zonecfg:zone1:attr> end
zonecfg:zone1> verify
zonecfg:zone1> commit
zonecfg:zone1> info
zonecfg:zone1> exit
zoneadm -z zone1 install

# zlogin -C zone1

and it's done
you can start, stop zones as you do on any solaris instance
you just need to preceed all commands with a zoneadm -z or zlogin
es. zoneadm -z zone1 reboot

get opensolaris, distribute it, install it

2009-06-15T11:12:00.001-07:00

of course, how can we spread the OS if people don't even know where to get it?
the easiest way is through the distributing page opensolaris.com but if you have a slow internet connection, you can also require here for free the media to be sent directly to your home address (normally takes something like 1 month...)
Change the bios settings so that your pc starts from the cdrom and enjoy firstly the live distro (a Gnome Desktop environment), the starting point to test if your hardware will work with Opensolaris.
Then, as in most linux distros, launche the graphical installer and answer some few questions (really short process, impressive work from the point of view of the installation....have you ever installed a solaris for sparc???)

just be patience some 30 minutes to 1 hour and it's all done
os installed, grub configured
if you have a nvidia graphics, you can install proprietary drivers, while for ati there is a work-in-progress for radeonhd

i'm lost without grub

2009-06-14T07:05:00.000-07:00

as you may know, solaris x86 uses Grub as its boot loader, and so opensolaris does
the introduction of ZFS (we'd have time to talk about it) required some customizations of menu.lst, but most important thing, what you should do if grub gets lost?
according to opensolaris marketing, this os never breaks...but when it happens many newbies will remember the names of their ancestors...or simply move back to closed source ossss

first of all, go getting a copy of opensolaris live cd (it is needed in our procedure)
let's our pc boot from cdrom device and wait a little bit
ok, we are in with the live distro user (jack)
let's open the terminal and launch some commands:

-pfexec zpool import --> this command will give you back the device hosting our os (let's figure out it is c1d0s0, if we are using ide disks or c1t0d0s0 if we are on scsi)

-pfexec zpool import -f rpool-->this command will import rpool available on disks

-pfexec mkdir /mnt-->let's create a directory that we'll use then in mount commands

-pfexec zfs set mountpoint=legacy rpool/ROOT/opensolaris-->this way we'll tell the OS that we want to use legacy mount options for our ZFS (to be clearer, using vfstab and mount commands)

-pfexec mount -F zfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris /mnt-->now we will be able to access our ROOT fs under /mnt

-pfexec zfs set mountpoint=/mnt/rpool rpool-->telling the system that rpool structure will stay under /mnt too

-pfexec cd /mnt/boot/grub-->this way we access the grub directory on our hard disk

-pfexec installgrub stage1 stage2 /dev/rdsk/c1d0s0-->grub will install now on our hard disk (can add a -fm option before listing stages if this command fail)

-pfexec reboot-->if everything went well, you'll be able to boot your previously installed opensolaris

if you don't feel so confident....virtualize

2009-06-13T08:05:00.000-07:00

as I wrote in my introduction, I'm the first who recommends virtualizing....so you can keep all your data where they are until you'll find the config that you feel comfortable with
if you are looking for a free virtualization software, here you have the answer, always from Sun opensource contribution: VirtualBox
You can get it from sun.com or virtualbox.org
It is free and open
you'll be able to create virtualizations of quite enough OS and add so much virtual hardware you'll never afford to buy in reality...

let's give a try

2009-06-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

i'm a fan of open source since 1997 when I first tried to install a linux mandrake on my desktop abandoning the test right then because of the damn winmodem....I just had 3/4 years of computer experience, and without my 33.6 kbps I was fucked up: absolutely no knowledge of this new OS (not even windows was an opened book to me)
after university I was able to start working on solaris and linux and hope could help someone else to give them a try
most of conversations will .be on opensolaris (so many places to talk about linux already exist)
the most important rule is: DON'T LOVE ANY CLOSED SOURCE UNIX...
now that Sun Microsystems has a so doubtful future, is the best moment to thank this company for freeing its wonderful OS just in time