The view from the Engine Room

Indiana Preview 2 - my new desktop

This weekend I decided to bite the bullet and convert my desktop to Indiana Preview 2. Since unlike most people at Sun my desktop machine also receives my email, and hosts both my home directory and calendar server, the switch-over needed some quiet concentration on my part to insure nothing important got left behind.

The installation of Preview 2 (now available here) went smoothly – not surprising, since I'd tested many trial builds on the same machine, a 2 x 2.8GHz Ultra 40. After installation completed and the machine rebooted, I created a second zpool with the two remaining drives; I use this for my home directory, mail spool, tunes and pkg server. This isolates me from any difficulties with the new installer or possible future upgrade problems. ZFS of course makes this all very easy:

: barts@cyber[227]; zfs list
NAME                              USED  AVAIL  REFER  MOUNTPOINT
rpool                            2.63G   224G  49.5K  /rpool
rpool@install                        0      -  49.5K  -
rpool/ROOT                       2.62G   224G    18K  none
rpool/ROOT@install                   0      -    18K  -
rpool/ROOT/preview2              2.62G   224G  2.09G  legacy
rpool/ROOT/preview2@install      66.8M      -  1.94G  -
rpool/ROOT/preview2/opt           483M   224G   483M  /opt
rpool/ROOT/preview2/opt@install    77K      -  3.61M  -
rpool/export                     2.44M   224G    19K  /export
rpool/export@install               15K      -    19K  -
rpool/export/home                2.41M   224G  2.39M  /export/home
rpool/export/home@install          19K      -    21K  -
zfs                               177G  51.8G    21K  /zfs
zfs/home                          133G  51.8G   133G  /export/home/cyber
zfs/local                         291M  51.8G   291M  /usr/local
zfs/mail                          110M  51.8G   110M  /var/mail
zfs/music                        43.4G  51.8G  43.3G  /zfs/music
zfs/music@2.1.2008               2.54M      -  42.3G  -
zfs/repo                           18K  51.8G    18K  /zfs/repo
: barts@cyber[228]; 

I then got to thinking about having a mirrored root pool; I hunted up one more 250GB drive, hot plugged it into the machine (love those SATA features) and used cfgadm -al and cfgadm -c to get Solaris to find the drive. Zpool attach took care of establishing the mirror; the mirror was resilvered in just a few minutes since ZFS knows what's data and what's empty space.

Now I needed dovecot, since I run an IMAP server to allow remote access of my mail. Off to dovecot.org for a tarball, download, configure and hmm – no C compiler. pkg search -r gcc told me that I needed SUNWgcc installed, so pkg install SUNWgcc grabbed the compiler, assembler and binutils. Cool. Run configure again and whoops – no headers! pkg search -r stdlib.h said I needed SUNWhea, so pkg install SUNWhea and I was compiling dovecot.... For a quick look at the packages available in Indiana so far browse over to http://pkg.opensolaris.org. I wrote this blog post using openoffice – which you'll find in a package called openoffice.

Indiana and IPS are usable, but we've still got a lot work to do:

• The packages need to be re-factored into smaller pieces and renamed and tagged to better support minimization, searching, etc.

• The command line pkg interface needs some attention...

• and here's still much work to be done in constraints, simplifying pkg publishing and there are lots of bugs, tracebacks and other issues to address.

   

However, it's coming together – and being able to upgrade from preview2 from preview1 without running any postinstall scripts helps use feel better about the assertions that started the project....

Posted at 07:23PM Feb 12, 2008 by barts in General  |