Stacey Marshall's Weblog: Stac, Stace, ace - blog space

Once the Solaris OE installation had completed the install process installed Sun Studio 11 and relevant patches. No further intervention was required by me.

At the end of the installation Solaris ejected the DVD media and booted itself from the internal disk. I was then presented with a new GRUB menu allowing me too boot Windows or Solaris, the default. As Solaris began to boot after my first install there was a moment of doubt when the screen went blank and the following three lines were displayed:

SunOS Release 5.11 Version snv_55 64-bit
Copyright 1983-2006 SunMicrosystems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
Use is subject to license terms.

Then nothing for a while (around 1 to 2 minuets)... followed by a message indicating that the network interface had failed to allocate an address using DHCP! That's because I had not plugged in the RJ45 cable. I did not see this delay or get the warning message when I next booted with the cable attached.

Hostname: solaris-devx
Configuring devices.
Loading smf(5) service descriptions: 150/150
...

solaris-devx console login:

At this point the machine seemed to be waiting for me to login... But I know better and waited for the GUI login to appear... I waited... I'm sure I should wait... perhaps I need to choose X.Org or Xsun from some place? I wait some more. Some warning messages from sendmail and syslogd pollute my screen:

Jan 17 22:41:31 scully sendmail[1194]: [ID 702911 mail.crit] My unqualified host name (scully) unknown; sleeping for retry
Jan 17 22:42:31 scully svc.startd[7]: [ID 122153 daemon.warning] svc:/network/smtp:sendmail: Method or service exit timed out.  Killing contract 61.
Jan 17 22:42:31 scully svc.startd[7]: [ID 636263 daemon.warning] svc:/network/smtp:sendmail: Method "/lib/svc/method/smtp-sendmail start" failed due to signal KILL.
Jan 17 22:42:39 scully syslogd: line 45: WARNING: loghost could not be resolved

I login as root providing the password that I was asked for during the install and I choose gnome over CDE when asked for the windowing environment to use and I'm in.

The first thing to do is to add a local user. Thoughtfully the "User and Group " application has already been started for me.

added 19 Jan:

To prevent the messages above (but not necessarily cure the issue) I disabled sendmail (svcadm disable sendmail) and added 'loghost' to my loopback (127.0.0.1) entry in /etc/inet/hosts.

added 20 Jan:

I now find that the Ferrari can boot and provide me with the GUI login screen in less than 1 minute. So as suggested it might be that Solaris was simply busy updating bits in the background after the first few boots. After all I was installing different bits. As a brief test I re-enabled sendmail today but still find Solaris boots in less than 1 minute. Or perhaps its that I'm now using inetmenu?

Stace