Sections
You are here: Home Topics Sun

Sun

Oct 31, 2009

After Ontario LinuxFest 2009

I was at the Ontario GNU Linux Fest 2009 and what a time it was!

We kicked off Friday night with a welcome party at the hotel. I had some great conversations with fellow speakers and attendees, sharing the cool things we are working on as well as a few drinks and some appetisers.opinions

Richard Weait, one of the event organisers, introduced himself to me and did a fine job of making me feel welcome and appreciated, as he did throughout the event. Hell, he even helped me load-in on Saturday morning!

Many attendees flocked to our OpenSolaris booth, where we were handing out the brand new ZFS Administration Guide, which went like hotcakes, OpenSolaris CDs and Getting Started Guide. Thanks to Teresa Giacomini and the great team at Sun. A number of people came by whom I helped with installs (bare metal & virtualbox). Questions abounded from both noobs and Solaris veterans. Of course the ubiquitous "How is the Oracle/Sun deal going to affect OpenSolaris?" came up many times .. too bad I didn't have a copy of this FAQ: http://www.oracle.com/us/sun/038563.pdf to elaborate, though my opinions answered similarly.

Later in the afternoon I gave my presentation "Why OpenSolaris?" to a full room (about 70 people). After my slides we engaged in a Q & A session, followed by some door prizes (provided by our great event organisers) for two questions I culled from my talk. They were both answered correctly and quickly. Glad to see everyone was paying attention! For those that came by our booth after, I gave the remaining OpenSolaris t-shirts.

A great dinner was put on for the speakers Saturday evening, with the Google sponsored party following (thanks for the GoogleBooze!), where we all had a chance to continue some great conversations.

This was an excellent experience and highly recommended .. can't wait for Ontario LinuxFest 2010!

Oct 20, 2009

SXCE to OpenSolaris Migration on Sparc

Using some already existing blogs/mail-lists and elbow grease, I've migrated a SPARC server to OpenSolaris from SXCE.

With SXCE EOL coming up fast and the AI not quite up to speed (for this instance at any rate), I've cobbled together and carried out a migration of a Sun e220r sparc box from SXCE.

I used quite abit from Edward Pilatowicz's blog and also Alex Eremin's blog . I altered/diverged to suit my needs as well due to things changing rapidly in OpenSolaris.

I built IPS from the gate, more details on IPS and the mercurial url here: http://opensolaris.org/os/project/pkg/ . With that installed proceeded to create an new root pool on a separate disk.

I utilized the following from Edward's blog, where I've diverged/changed I have commented out the original and noted beside my change:

# we're going to do our install in /a
PKG_IMAGE=/a; export PKG_IMAGE

# mount our zpool on /a
mkdir -p $PKG_IMAGE
mount -F zfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris $PKG_IMAGE
mkdir -p $PKG_IMAGE/opt
mount -F zfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris/opt $PKG_IMAGE/opt

# create the basic opensolaris install image.
#pkg image-create -F -a opensolaris.org=http://pkg.opensolaris.org $PKG_IMAGE
pkg image-create -f -F -a opensolaris.org=http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev $PKG_IMAGE # Sparc requires the dev repos
#pkg refresh
pkg -R $PKG_IMAGE refresh --full # We're not clobbering our original or changing it so the next few are mine too
pkg -R $PKG_IMAGE install entire
pkg -R $PKG_IMAGE install SUNWcsd SUNWcs
pkg -R $PKG_IMAGE install babel_install

# seed the initial smf repository
cp $PKG_IMAGE/lib/svc/seed/global.db $PKG_IMAGE/etc/svc/repository.db
chmod 0600 $PKG_IMAGE/etc/svc/repository.db
chown root:sys $PKG_IMAGE/etc/svc/repository.db

# setup smf profiles
ln -s ns_files.xml $PKG_IMAGE/var/svc/profile/name_service.xml
ln -s generic_limited_net.xml $PKG_IMAGE/var/svc/profile/generic.xml
ln -s inetd_generic.xml $PKG_IMAGE/var/svc/profile/inetd_services.xml
ln -s platform_none.xml $PKG_IMAGE/var/svc/profile/platform.xml

 

After that I finished with:

echo "rpool/ROOT/opensolaris  -  /  zfs  -  no  -" >> $PKG_IMAGE/etc/vfstab

echo "rpool/ROOT/opensolaris/opt  -  /opt  zfs  -  yes  -" >> $PKG_IMAGE/etc/vfstab

devfsadm -r $PKG_IMAGE

bootadm update-archive -R $PKG_IMAGE

installboot -F zfs /platform/$(uname -i)/lib/fs/zfs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0

 

 Copying relevant networking, passwd, ssh keys, etc. files from the running SXCE system to $PKG_IMAGE, I successfully booted to my OpenSolaris install and tweaked from there.

Sep 30, 2009

Toronto Opensolaris @ Linux Fest

Plan to be there!

Hi all,

A heads up: Saturday, 24 October 2009 (plus additional fun stuff on the Friday night previous and Sunday following)
Check out: http://onlinux.ca ; check here: http://onlinux.ca/venue for the directions ; and here for about: http://onlinux.ca/about
Anyone that plans (or can) to attend this is a very cool event and we, <TOROSUG> will be there. I'd like anyone that has the cycles and can pitch in with us to rsvp me.
Looking forward to this!

--
Cheers,

Steven
-----------------------
Steven Acres
Toronto OpenSolaris User Group <TOROSUG>
Leader
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/torosug