These are my notes on a recent experience I've had which required me to get Solaris up and running on 47 systems in our computer lab on a very short notice. I'm posting on it on my blog in order to document this effort in the form of a step by step guide so that it may help other sun campus ambassadors or anyone else who ever happens to fall in a similar situation.

The Problem

Let me make the problem clearer. You have to get solaris running on all these systems (having only Windows XP installed) and you neither have enough time in your hands nor the permission to install Solaris on all of them. Oh, and they don't have CD/DVD drives, so booting Live CD's like Belenix is not an option either.

Possible Solutions

There are lot many ways to do this. These are the possible solutions that came to my mind that time:

1. Network Installation of Solaris- Solaris 10 provides a lot of ways to do a automated network installation of Solaris on many machines having the same or even different hardware configuration: Web Start, Custom JumpStart Instalation, Solaris Flash Archives, etc. (Note that this is not an option if you're not permitted to install Solaris or if the target systems don't meet the hardware requirements of Solaris)
2. Booting a Live CD: The simplest solution (if the target systems do have CD/DVD drives) is to burn a lot of copies of Belenix, Nexenta or Schillix LiveCD's and to boot all the systems off of them.
3. Booting Solaris from USB drives: This is something that was accomplished by one of the very active and successful campus ambassadors of last year, Anil Gulecha, who is now our Tech Lead :). He was the first CA to make such a great contribution to the OpenSolaris community.
4. Booting a Live CD's ISO over the network: This is one of the more trickier ways. This goes one step ahead of just booting the systems off of live cd's, to first network booting the Solaris GRUB on all the systems, mounting the live cd's iso (eg. belenix) from the network (via NFS / FTP / etc.) and then booting from the network mounted ISOs. This would however require a lot of Network bandwidth and good I/O speed on the server as all these systems would repeatedly access data over the network from the server for almost each and every action, application opened, and command run.
5. Remote Desktop Sessions using a Windows X-Server/XDMCP client, to a Solaris VM running on a high-end windows server (i.e. Instant Thin-Client Access to Solaris from within Windows!)

The last solution is the one I finally used. Its IMHO, the easiest and most elegant solution involving no software installation / tricky stuff on the client systems at all. It does not put any load on the clients and puts very little load on the server. It involves the following steps...

1. Installation of Solaris inside a Virtual Machine:
   Here's a step-by-step guide (PDF with screenshots) for configuring a virtual machine and installing Solaris 10 on it. At the end you'll be able to run the virtual machine inside VMware Workstation 5.5 or inside VMware Player 1.0.
   
   OR
   
   Download the Solaris Virtual Appliance, a preinstalled, fully configured virtual machine made available by SDN.
   
   Notes:
   
   • Set connection mode to "Bridged mode" in the VM. (in my case the VM got an IP address automatically by DHCP. If there is no DHCP in your network, then you may have to set the IP address settings yourself using ifconfig in Solaris)
     
     
     
     
   • You might also want to install VMware Tools for Solaris 10, which provides more ease of use with the virtual machine - copy/paste functionality, leave and enter the VM window without pressing Ctrl+Alt, etc.
     
     
2. Configure XDMCP on the Solaris server:
   There are many ways of doing it (both GUI and console). Its so much simpler than doing the same thing on Linux (no painful textfile manipulation!). Make sure you are logged in as root.
   
   Using the console:
   
   1. Open a terminal
   2. Type gdmsetup
   3. A dialog box will appear, go to the XDMCP tab and click the box that says "Enable XDMCP"
   4. Configure all the relevant options like maximum number of connections, time limit, etc.
      
      
   Using GUI (Java Desktop System):
   
   
   
   
   1. Launch -> Applications -> Utilities -> Administration -> Login Screen Setup
   2. Go to the XDMCP tab and click the box that says "Enable XDMCP".
   3. Configure all the relevant options like maximum number of connections, time limit, etc.
      
      Note: Please remember the XDMCP port you set here (default is 177) and make sure it is not blocked by the firewall on the client systems.

          Finally, restart your system (in this case the virtual machine) for the settings to take effect.

1. Creating users on the Solaris VM for the remote sessions:
   
   Now that we have a Solaris virtual machine up and ready, we need to create some users in it, which we will use for concurrently connecting the remote sessions from the many client systems. To do that, follow these simple steps:
   
   
   1. Make sure you are logged in as Root.
   2. Open a terminal and run the command 'smc' to open the Sun Management Console.
      
      
      
      
   3. Once the Sun Management Console screen shows up, select This Computer from the list
      
      
      
      
   4. Under Navigation, go to System Configuration > Users > User Accounts.
      
      
      
      
   5. Right click anywhere in the main window > Add Multiple Users > With Wizard..
      
      
      
      
   6. Now the Add Multiple Users Wizard starts up.
      
      
      
      Choose the 3rd option: "Automatically generate a series of user names"
      
      
   7. Step 2:
      
      
      
      
   8. Step 3:
      
      
      
      
   9. Step 4:
      
      
      
      
   10. Step 5:
       
       
       
       
   11. Step 6:
       
       
       
       
   12. Step 7:
       
       
       
       
   13. Step 8:
       
       
       
       
   14. Step 9:
       
       
       
       
   15. Step 10:
       
       
       
       
   16. Thats it. Solaris automatically creates N number of users with preconfigured settings for us in the background :)
       

1. Choose and install a good X Server port for windows:
   The Solaris graphics system (gnome, JDS, etc.) uses the X windows client-server architecture. X windows is as equally at home across the network as it is on a local machine and thus all we need to connect remotely to our Solaris system from Windows is a good X windows server ported to windows. There are many open source as well as commercial X server ports available for windows.
   
   Following is a short list I know of:
   

• XMing (free and opensource)
• Xfree86 (free and opensource)
• XWin32 (commercial)
• Citrix (commercial)
• GoGlobal (commercial)
• eXceed (commercial)
• Xmanager (commercial)

I chose Xming owing to its simplicity and easy of use. All you have to do is download it from its SourceForge.net project page and follow the simple installation wizard (which creates icons for you on your desktop and start menu).

Note: We will install Xming only on one machine. After installation, copy all the files from the Xming installation folder (default: "C:\Program Files\Xming") to a folder on your desktop, and then you may even uninstall Xming. We will simply share this folder over the network, so that the client systems can open the share and run Xming directly (without installation).

1. Using XMing to do Solaris on Windows Magic
   • Simple XDMCP session to the remote Solaris VM
     1. Start the Solaris virtual machine on the server system
     2. Open a terminal and type ifconfig -a to get the IP address of the system. Note this IP address.
     3. Share the installed Xming folder obtained in step 3
     4. On a client system, open the network shared folder.
     5. Run Xlaunch.exe
     6. On the first screen select "One window", let the display number be 0, press Next.
        
        
        
        
     7. Choose "Open session via XDMCP" (third option) as the session type and press next again.
        
        
        
        
     8. Choose "Connect to host" and specify the server's IP address you noted in step 4.2
        
        
        
        
     9. Press next and next again and then finish.
        
        
        
        Voila!
        
        After some time Xming starts up and you see a beautiful Solaris 10 login screen :)
        
        
        
        And here's Solaris Java Desktop System :)
        
        Now all you need to do is to do the same thing on all the client windows systems you want to remotely run Solaris on.
        
        Note: In order to run multiple instances of Xming, you need to specify a new Display Number at the Display Settings screen (first screen) of the Xlaunch wizard.
        
        
   • Using Putty (with X11 Port Forwarding) and XMing to run specific applications and for more security.
     
     
     1. Configuring SSH in Solaris:
        In the Solaris VM, open the file /etc/ssh/sshd_config in a text editor and make sure it has the following lines:
        
        # X11 tunneling options
        X11Forwarding yes
        X11DisplayOffset 10
        X11UseLocalhost yes
        
        If you made any changes to the above file, restart the ssh daemen by running the following command:
        
        # svcadm restart svc:/network/ssh
        
        
     2. Installing and Configuring Putty for X11 Forwarding
        1. Download and install Putty (the best free telnet/SSH client)
        2. Open Putty. In the Session screen enter the VM's IP address (type ifconfig -a in a terminal on Solaris to get it). Leave everything else as is.
           
           
           
           
        3. Go to the SSH > Tunnels screen and check "Enable X11 Forwarding", then set X display location as "locahost:0". Leave the rest of the options as is.
           
           
           
           
        4. It's usually a good idea to save the putty session (in the Session screen) so that you can easily load the above configuration anytime.
           
           
     3. After finishing the above configuration, click on the "Open" button to connect to the SSH server on Solaris.
     4. Press Yes on the Putty Security Alert (it wont trouble you again.)
     5. You will get a login prompt. Due to some security restriction, you cannot login as root, so you have to login as some other user (see step 3 to learn how to create users using the Solaris Management Console).
     6. Now run Xlaunch. Choose Multiple Windows on the first screen and Start no client on the next. Finish the wizard. Xming will now start in the system tray.
     7. In the putty window, open any solaris application and it's GUI will get forwarded to the locally running X server if all went well.
        
        
        

And.. The Solaris Thin-Client Experience enlivened on 47 systems at JIIT University!

Cheers! :)