Probably

Sun have done some work in recent times with liveupgrade – the last time I looked at it, a few years back now, it was rubbish. I thought it was about time I took another look, since a lot of the updates in OpenSolaris were looking good. (continue reading…)

Came across an intriguing problem today. Whilst trying to develop a generic Solaris PXE boot solution for x86 Solaris installs I was having a problem with enabling NIS post install. (continue reading…)

I’ve been looking at OpenSolaris a lot more of late, and in particular I’ve been trying to work with AI, the Automated Installer. (continue reading…)

As much as I like Solaris the packaging system is crap. And fathoming out what package you need to install to gain a particular command is nigh on impossible. (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…)

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…)

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 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…)

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…)