Probably

In my earlier post about using local::lib I commented that CPAN wouldn’t untar with the Solaris shipped tar program, and you had to use GNU tar from OpenCSW or Blastwave. 1.94 appears to fix the problem and untars just fine with the native Solaris tar.

Recently a friend and I were trying to get XenServer 5 to use our Solaris 10 server as it’s backing store. We specifically wanted to use an iSCSI volume exported to the Xen server, as the performance is promised to be considerably better than NFS.

However, try as we might, the XenServer wouldn’t make use of the iSCSI LUN as exported - it could see it, but wouldn’t make use of it. Then we discovered this bug… (continue reading…)

In my last post about installing Catalyst on Solaris I went to great lengths to install every Perl module, in order, from CPAN. This was a painful process to establish, and just as painful to emulate. The post was updated back in March to include CPAN bundles, which would do most of the hard work for you - but as was pointed out in the comments, it should’ve been a simple case of ‘cpan Catalyst’. (continue reading…)

This is one of the weirdest problems I’ve had for a while. On one of the servers I look after my home directory was a zfs filesystem set to /home/user. If I ever did an rm -rf on a directory structure underneath my home dir, it would remove all the files but leave all directories in place. The only way to get rid of the directories was to recursively remove each one. Painful.

Today I discovered a fix - although I don’t know the reason why. (continue reading…)

I came across an intriguing problem today whilst trying to rebuild a server. The server was physically located somewhere I couldn’t utilise a boot server, so I decided to quickly throw together a WAN Boot server (which I won’t go into here, but see ref [1] below). (continue reading…)

I’ve been testing some new kernel tunings for Oracle databases the last few days, and experienced the odd error “error: unknown error 22 setting key ‘kernel.shmall’” when trying to sort out shared memory. Even more bizarre was the fact the setting was actually being set just fine.

After Googling a bit I couldn’t fathom out what this error meant or what was really wrong. So I did a quick strace on a ’sysctl -p’. Bingo.

I had a comment at the end of the line in sysctl.conf! It was that simple. Move the comment to the line above, et voila, no whining!

I tend to build perl modules to live in my home directory. Setting up CPAN with PREFIX= and LIB= variables means I can compile/build modules without being root and use them in any script with a simple ‘use lib …’ statement. (continue reading…)

I decided to take a look at Catalyst on Solaris. Having done a bit of work with it on Mac OSX, I discovered it wasn’t that easy to get going on Solaris with the stock Perl. Even using cat-install from ShadowCat didn’t render the easy result I’d experienced using MacPorts. After a few hours battling with CPAN, I’ve managed to come up with this list of modules to get Catalyst up and running. (continue reading…)

Centralised package delivery on Solaris can be a bit of a pain. Blastwave was a nice solution, but with OpenCSW splitting away from them and the two camps now delivering the same packages to the same disk hierarchy we’re left with too much choice and a confusion of options. They’re still both a good solution, but maybe there is a better option. (continue reading…)

This example is using snv66 for the target, and Solaris 10u3 for the initiator, as iSCSI target isn’t in Solaris 10u3 (11/06), but is in from u4 (08/07). This should work fine on Solaris 10 u4 and beyond. (continue reading…)