Learning Solaris 10 Check out the Zones F.A.Q. !

With a new job comes a new laptop. I went for Acer Aspire 9424WSMi. It of course comes with Windows Media Center preinstalled. Because I’m gonna work with production Solaris machines, I decided that it would be best to install Solaris on it. Here is the results of my attempts :

1. Tried to install official Solaris 10 06/06. Installation successful but laptop crashes very early during boot. Too early to find out the guilty device driver.
2. Installed Solaris Express 11/06. No problem whatsoever. Nvidia card recognised, beautiful desktop out of the box. Networking fine thanks to an updated version of the rge Realtek Gigabit Ethernet Driver. Would have loved to stop there BUT… I need to install JES on top of Solaris and for whatever unexplained reason, the JES installer crashes at launch time. Couldn’t find anything on the internet on the subject. Of course, one can try to install every JES product manually. But I need many so that wasn’t so practical. Strangely enough, in the stacktrace output of the installer error, it showed a method called “checkOsVersion”. Would that be the reason ?
3. Installed official Solaris 10 11/06. No crash during boot. Great. But no network. The “rge” driver is not the updated release so that it cannot take my NIC. Tried to use the “rge” driver of Solaris Express/Opensolaris but that failed as well, some network projects having been integrated with some dependencies between them.

And the solution is : on December 19, an updated “gani” driver showed up on the Free NIC drivers for Solaris superb page. some “modload” later, I could type :
#ifconfig gani0 plumb
#ifconfig gani0 dhcp

and I had got the net work…

Still to be done : I have no wireless yet. This is normal because the laptop uses a Intel 3945ABG chipset for which even OpenSolaris doesn’t have a driver yet (in development right now).

But I have enough to start working…

Now that I want to download OpenOffice for Solaris x86 to compare it with the StarOffice suite provided with Solaris 10, I see that the download is available as a torrent. The problem is that Solaris doesn’t come with any Bit torrent client. After a bit of searching, I see that Azureus is the way to go. Completely Java. Unfortunately, although the latest release is available for Solaris 10 Sparc, nothing yet on the Solaris 10 x86 front. After more searching, it seems that Azureus is using the eclipse libraries , which are not available yet for x86 in the official distribution. Although the Azureus-x86 wiki basically tells us that we just need to compile eclipse ourselves and then replace some libraries, this is not trivial and more that what I want to do. But of course, someone did it before…

Eclipse release for Solaris on x86 is a BugId open for Eclipse where people talk about what I need. Included in the webpage is a nice attachement that contains the needed libraries.

Soooo :

1. Download Azureus for Sparc : Azureus_2.4.0.2_Solaris.tar.bz2
2. #bunzip Azureus_2.4.0.2_Solaris.tar.bz
3. #tar xf Azureus_2.4.0.2_Solaris.tar
You should now have a directory named azureus. In it, you’ll find 5 swt libraries ( libswt* ). These are the SPARC ones that you’ll need to replace by their x86 equivalent.
4. Download the eclipse SWT libraries for Solaris 10 x86
5. In another directory, unzip the file eclipse_launcher_and_swt_jar_for_solaris_10×86.zip You’ll have a directory and a jar file.
6. #unzip org.eclipse.swt.gtk.solaris.sparc_3.1.1.jar libswt-atk-gtk-3139.so libswt-awt-gtk-3139.so libswt-cde-gtk-3139.so libswt-gtk-3139.so libswt-pi-gtk-3139.so
   will extract the 5 libraries from the jar file. Simply copy the 5 libraries to the azureus directory.
7. Run the azureus command in the azureus directory. It should work…

Keith Wesolowski recently announced that the Fault Management subsystem is now capable of :

1. sending basic fault information to a Network Management Server. Provides the same information than the one sent to the syslog daemon.

2. Providing more information on the errors as well as FMA configuration info on request. An Fault Management MIB describes what information can be obtained.

Available on Nevada Build 33 and later so soon in Solaris.

The long story in this blog post.

T: OpenSolaris, FMA, SNMP

Finally a document aggregates the SMF information that was disseminated everywhere on the internet. This very good document from Rob Romack covers the following topic :

- SMF basics
- SMF components
- Example SMF Manifest for a new service, including a description of all the existing attributes ( require_all, … )
- SMF at boot time + SMF and milestones (the one area that will likely trigger a bunch of calls to Sun Support )
- The funny demonstration of the fact that the SMF engine is tracking services with cycling dependencies
- An original use of the dependency system that would allow somebody to login as root only if the configured name service is not available

View the document

T: SMF, OpenSolaris, Solaris 10

For those who cannot afford to reinstall their machines and have no spare computers, it is a good solution…

View the Howto

T: OpenSolaris, VmWare

Sun is not known to be a great developer of GUI applications. The best example is probably the unlikely suite of administration tools offered to Solaris sysadmins along the years. Now that “admintool” is a thing of the past (as of Solaris 10) and considering that the Solaris Management Console is not significantly better, we are left with this sad conclusion : managing Solaris with a GUI is a pain –> managing Solaris is impossible if you are not a sysadmin.

The good news is that a new OpenSolaris project has been created to make Solaris configuration by end-users easier : it is called Project Visual Panels and looks promising.

Since the underlying storage is provided by the SMF data store, it looks like the graphical Solaris “registry” is on its way. Let’s see if Solaris can do it better than Windows…

Go to the project page
Go to the preliminary screeshots of the GUI

From Solaris 9 update 2, a new framework was introduced that would make it possible to select among a number of hash algorithms the famous one that would be used to compute the encrypted version of the passwords. Before that time, the traditional crypt() routine was used, limiting the size of passwords to 8 characters and providing the even more famous 13 characters found in the /etc/shadow file.

The Solaris Pluggable Crypt Framework makes it possible to choose from 3 new algorithms, all allowing a maximal password size of 255 characters:

# cat /etc/security/crypt.conf
(…)
1 crypt_bsdmd5.so.1
2a crypt_bsdbf.so.1
md5 crypt_sunmd5.so.1

What are these libraries?

From the man pages: (more…)

A view of things to come, Jerry Jelinek, who recently moved to the Zones team, has recently submitted a proposal to implement two new functionalities for zones :

• Moving a zone by specifying a new ‘zonepath’
• Cloning a zone by copying a non-global zone to a new ‘zonepath’

SUMMARY:

This fast-track enhances the Solaris Zones [1] subsystem
to address two existing RFEs. The first [2] enables non-global
zones to be relocated from one point on the filesystem to another;
this may involve actually moving the bits and requires changing the
associated metadata (the “zonepath”). The second [3] enables
administrators to rapidly provision new non-global zones, once
one has been set up, by allowing installation via copying from
another (non-global) zone.

Patch binding is requested for these sub-commands and the stability
of the interfaces is “evolving”.

DETAILS:

(more…)

Postgres is one of the oldest and most advanced Open Source Database available today.

If you need Solaris but don’t need Oracle, this news is good news !

Related link : Sun’s Postgres for Solaris page

Sun finally announced what they want to do with the “Janus” project. As a reminder, it lets Linux applications ( binaries ) run unmodified on a running Solaris machine.

Well, integration is a major Solaris 10 feature, which means that the Linux Environment can be used in a Solaris Container as well, aka a Zone.

What Sun is saying is that, if you are running some Linux machines and are afraid of migrating to Solaris because of application issues, well, there is now a way to limit the risk while still taking advantages of the brilliant features of Solaris 10.

It is even possible to debug Linux apps running on Solaris using DTrace !

Related Link : Sun’s linux in container page

T : OpenSolaris