Wednesday November 19, 2008

After spending too long today installing onto the wrong disk of an x4500 I thought I better write down how to find the right one.

The solaris install document: http://docs.sun.com/source/819-4362-16/solaris.html tells us that the bootable devices are:

Now the important thing to remember is, ignore the device nodes from the table. Instead boot of the media and use cfgadm to list the devices and the device nodes for sata3/0 and sata3/4.

# cfgadm | grep 'sata3/[04]'    
sata3/0::dsk/c3t0d0            disk         connected    configured   ok
sata3/4::dsk/c3t4d0            disk         connected    configured   ok
# 

So on this system and this OS (snv_101a) the boot devices are c3t0d0 and c3t4d0.

Thursday August 21, 2008

While away on vacation I had the “pleasure” to finally product test the Park Tyre Boot I have been carrying in my saddle bag for two or three years. The only problem was getting the backing paper off as the years of sitting in a saddle bag and getting wet seemed to have had a negative effect on the paper. However once removed The managed to cover the 15mm gash in the sidewall such that the inner tube no longer poked out even at 100psi. In fact it did such a good job that it was hard to see where the gash was after applying the boot.

All in all a good result. I will continue to carry one but will try and find a way to keep them dry, not easy in English weather.

Friday June 20, 2008

After doing my second ZFS to ZFS live upgrade on a laptop I realise I will be starting to test grub's ability to handle lots of different boot targets in it's boot menu:

Already I can see that grub has a scrolling feature I had never seen before!

Tuesday May 20, 2008

Twenty years ago I fat fingered my workstation. Then it was using "newfs -n" rather than "newfs -N", shortly after the system paniced unable to find i-node 2. I had to restore. Restoring a diskless 3/50 running SunOS 3.5 was only less painful because I used to dump, when dump was dump not ufsdump, the network disk partitions of all the clients every night. Sorry I digress but it is still burned on my memory.

Today I fat fingered my laptop. I managed to type a script, at the command prompt, that ran with root priveleges and ended up doing "cd ../.. ; rm -r *". That took it to /. I stopped it but the damage was already done. However since I am running OpenSolaris and had taken the precaution of taking a recursive snapshot of the pool after I last installed any software all I had to do was roll back the filesystems.

Specifically I had to roll back:

• rpool - It contains the grub menu or at least it does once I recovered it.

• rpool/ROOT - I'm not sure I had to roll this one back but it seemed wise.

• rpool/ROOT/opensolaris - yes the real root file system. The lack of a kernel was certain to cause problems.

• rpool/ROOT/opensolaris/opt - again I'm not sure I had to roll this one back but it seems best to keep the root file systems consistent.

I need to bring those auto snapshot scripts over.

I'll get to describe what I was doing later. It was very cool, well quite cool.