Andreas Huber's Weblog

To mount a shared folder in a OpenSolaris guest in VirtualBox, you have to install the Guest Additions and then mount the file system type vboxfs. The Usage is:

mount -F vboxfs <share> <mountpoint>

If you want to share the filesystem /share from the host to the guest, then first create the share. Go to “Shared Folders” in the Virtual Machine's Settings and click the little folder with the green plus on the right.

Then select the folder to share (/share in the example) and enter a name for the share (share here).

As a result, you will see the folder in the settings:

Now boot the OpenSolaris, log in and open a Terminal. I assume that you are using the user creates during boot which has the “System Adminitrator” profile. The commands will be executed with the rights given by this profile, so they need to be executes with pfexec.

First, create the mountpoint if it doesn't exist. You will have to do this only once.

pfexec mkdir /share

Now, mount the share.

pfexec mount -F vboxfs share /share

If you want to have the filesystem mounted on every boot, then add this to the file /etc/vfstab. You can do this by executing pfexec vi /etc/vfstab.

share   -   /share  vboxfs  -   yes -

OpenSolaris supports virtual networks using virtual interfaces connected with virtual switches.
This feature was introduced with Project Crossbow in OpenSolaris 2009.06.
To visualize the internal network(s), I created a perl script which takes the output of dladm show-link and generates a dot-File, which then can be rendered using Graphviz.

Here's an example:

One of my current "projects" is to install a Solaris server at home. My colleague, Constantin already has one for some years an has already written several blog entries about it. Yesterday, at the MUCOSUG meeting, he gave us an interesting presentation about his findings so far. In the talk afterwards, I also learnd about some pieces of hardware wich are better suited than others. I will post my findings here for me as a reference and in case someone is interested. ;-)

• The AMD Phenon is a good CPU, it takes more power than an Intel Atom, but if you also count the power for the chipset, it probably takes less power. And of course, it's 64bit, which is recommended for ZFS (speeds up the calculation of the 64bit checksums)


• If not much more expensive, I would prefere ECC-protected RAM


• The Intel ethernet network cards are very good supported by Solaris drivers (e1000g)


• For SATA-Controllers, the LSI ones have good drivers

I've got a new mobile handset, the Nokia E71 which brings a QR-Code Reader with it. So adding my business card to the addressbook is a easy as taking a snapshot of this picture: