Solaris Express on a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200

I bought myself one of those cheap laptops the other month. I needed a small machine for testing and since laptops are just as cheap (if not cheaper) as desktops these days I got a laptop.
The machine came with Vista but I wanted to triple boot Vista, Ubuntu and Solaris Express Community Edition.

• Use diskmgmt.msc in Vista to shrink the partition the machine came with, Windows can do this natively so there is no need to use Partition Magic or similar tools. Create at least three new partitions. One for Solaris, one for Linux and one for Linux swap.
  
• Secondly install Solaris, boot off the CD and go through the basic installer. The widescreen resolution worked out of the box (as usual). Do a full install, spending time "fixing" a smaller installer is just annoying. Solaris will install it's grub boot loader on both the MBR and superblock (on the Solaris partition). It probably makes sense to leave a large slice unused so it can be used with ZFS after the installation is done.
  
• Install Ubuntu. Nothing simpler than that.
  
• Edit Ubuntu's grub menu config (/boot/grub/menu.lst) to include Solaris. Simply point it to the Solaris parition (hd0,2 for me). Add these lines at the end of the file.
  

  title Solaris
  root (hd0,2)
  chainloader

Done!

I had to install the gani NIC driver in Solaris to get the Ethernet card working and the Open Sound System sound card driver to get sound working.
The Atheros WiFi card is supposed to be supported but I couldn't get it to work, even after adding the pci device alias to the driver. I'll post an update if I get it to work.

Solaris 10 on Dell PowerEdge 1950 and 2950

I probably get an email every couple a weeks about this one, not sure why.
E-mails regarding something in Solaris not working on Dell PowerEdge 9th gen servers.

For any device driver related issues with Solaris on x86, the first resource to check if you run in to trouble is the Sun HCL, the 'hardware compatability list'.
Solaris 10 works fine on most Dell boxes, but some need NIC or HBA drivers.

For a Dell 2950 that tells us that Solaris works, from release 11/06 upwards, it also tells us to download the ethernet driver here and the MegaRAID SAS driver here.

NB, the Sun HCL does not mention the new 'III' series 9-gen server yet. I would guess they are working on as Sun and Dell recently partenered to provide better Solaris support. The PERC6 card may need some new drivers.

Sun 2002 flashback

We've been doing some shuffling around of hardware at work and I've recommissioned some old Sun hardware for a new QA environment.
Oh the memories I have of old Sun kit :)
The most exciting thing I've installed is a Sun v480 connected to a T3 brick. That combo was pretty much the industry standard Oracle solution when I had my first job in "real" systems administration and it was probably one of the first the real mid-range installs I did (not counting ageing 420r/450's).
To be honest, it's a match made in heaven. A quad cpu v480 with a t3 brick (or two) kicked out some real performance numbers in it's day. The v480 is probably one of the nicest boxes to work with (considering age and all), the boards are easy to fit, the RSC is awesome, it's simply rock solid. Running Solaris 8 of course (we still have *lots* of clients on Solaris 8 (with Solaris 10 gaining ground)).


The T3 array is pretty cool, but it brings back the frustrations everyone had with early low-end SANs. The limitation to two disk RAID volumes with very limited zoning and slicing. But hey, it's pretty old and is still pretty fast.



Now if I only could figure out how to get rid of that darn Sun E250 we still have running Sybase 12.5.4, it just works to well so far.

OpenSolaris SXDE upgrade time

It's been a while since I last played with Solaris Express Community Edition, so long that it actually changed names. There are now two versions, one for "random people" and one version for developers. SXCE is not released as often as SXDE but is more tested and stable, SXDE also comes with a lot more goodies, like Sun Studio 11 and Netbeans.
Anyway, the install of SXDE b63 under VMWare workstation 6 RC was as easy as ever.
However, at first boot I almost thought the VM was frozen for a minute or so, after grub it just sits there with a cursor in the corner of the screen for about 2 minutes before kicking off the kernel. All good after that though.
One thing I wanted to test was the new simplified resource capping in Solaris Zones. It was very straightforward and easy to use.
A couple of extra commands in zonecfg and the zone is capped to one core and 512Megs of memory. No more messing around with projects, except if you want really fine grained capping that is.
Cool!

Took a screenshoot:

Solaris 10 NFS version when using the automounter

Classic problem, new stuff is cool and all. But sometimes people (like myself) can't be bothered with configuring everything to the extreme so all new features are working and are compatible. For basic things, the basics is enough.
Take NFSv4, a default Linux box these days do support NFSv4 but I'm usually to lazy to configure it and just slap in an old NFSv3 line in my exports file. Fine with me, fine with most things, except one thing.
The Solaris 10 automounter, it detects the NFSv4 support and automatically tries to mount the NFS share in v4 mode when browsing /net.
Sidenote, if you are not familiar with the /net feature in Linux and Solaris it's pretty neat. See it as a cli version of "My network neighbourhood" in Windows. You can simply cd to /net/<machine name>/<share path> and the automounter will mount that share on that machine. Easy peasy.
Back to my problem, what do I want? I want the default NFS mount level to be vers=3.
Easy change, just uncomment and set NFS_CLIENT_MAXVERS to 3 in /etc/default/nfs.

Here's an example, the machine dolphin is my old trustworthy Linux workstation (yes, I like examples):

[root@marble /]$ cd /net/dolphin/
[root@marble dolphin]$ ls
shared
[root@marble dolphin]$ cd shared
bash: cd: shared: Permission denied
[root@marble dolphin]$ grep NFS_CLIENT_VERSMAX /etc/default/nfs
#NFS_CLIENT_VERSMAX=4
[root@marble dolphin]$ vim /etc/default/nfs
.. edit ... 
[root@marble dolphin]$ grep NFS_CLIENT_VERSMAX /etc/default/nfs
NFS_CLIENT_VERSMAX=3
[root@marble dolphin]$ cd shared
[root@marble shared]$ ls -l
total 84
drwxrwxr-x   6 hlinden  hlinden  4096 Mar  8 15:29 apps
drwxrwxr-x   6 hlinden  hlinden  4096 Sep  7  2006 archive
drwxrwxr-x  11 hlinden  hlinden 12288 Mar 21 16:32 download
drwxrwxr-x  15 hlinden  hlinden  4096 Mar  1 11:05 tmp
[root@marble shared]$

Using Solaris projects with Oracle

In older versions of Solaris (9 and earlier) we used to set the system resource control in /etc/system, in Solaris 10 and later we do it in a neater way. No more reboots or mocking about, all online, even while Oracle is running.
It's all about projects now.
I've just finished installing 10gR2 under Solaris Express Community Release Build 54 (long name ey?) under VMware on my new laptop.
Example project:

root@solvm[~]$ projadd -U oracle -K \
"project.max-shm-memory=(priv,4g,deny);\
project.max-sem-nsems=(priv,256,deny);\
project.max-sem-ids=(priv,100,deny);\
project.max-shm-ids=(priv,100,deny)" oraproj

-- Lets review our project

root@solvm[~]$ su - oracle
Sun Microsystems Inc.   SunOS 5.11      snv_54  October 2007
oracle@solvm[~]$ projects
default oraproj
oracle@solvm[~]$ projects -l oraproj
oraproj
        projid : 101
        comment: ""
        users  : oracle
        groups : (none)
        attribs: project.max-sem-ids=(priv,100,deny)
                 project.max-sem-nsems=(priv,256,deny)
                 project.max-shm-ids=(priv,100,deny)
                 project.max-shm-memory=(priv,4294967296,deny)
oracle@solvm[~]$

It's described slightly different in the Oracle installation manual but I'd say my way is slightly better. prctl is legacy. You can use usermod -K project=oraproj oracle to set the new project as the users default project (not really necessary)