Probably

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…)

A short while ago I got the opportunity to compare the performance of a number of operating systems on the same piece of hardware.

The server in question was a HP DL580G5, but with four 6-core Intel Dunnington CPUs in, each running at 2.66ghz. (continue reading…)

When it comes to picking what Operating System to use for your project, how do you go about picking the ‘right’ one?

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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…)

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. (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…)

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…)