Thursday August 11, 2005
Thursday August 11, 2005
Invading Canada by Air
Well I off for a few days and I'm going to do something I've never
done,fly my plane to a foreign country. Ok so it's Canada and maybe not
so foreign. Still it'll be something different.
My wife's twin brother Jay and his wife bought in inn
on an island in Lake Huron. My wife and my niece Gretchen that lives
with us (different brother in law) went up to visit them in early June
to help with the work of the grand opening. My niece liked it there
enough that she decided to stay for the summer. Now that school is
about to start again we have to bring her back.
When my wife drove there from here in NC it took 20+ hours of driving.
It looks like it'll take a little more than 5 hours of flying time. The
straight line will work wonders in this case. There is actually
an airport on the island
that is relatively close and has a customs office. So assuming I do all
the procedures correctly it shouldn't be a big deal. If I do something
wrong you might hear about it on national news when I get
intercepted... Let's hope not.
Aug 11 2005, 10:34:06 AM EDT
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New Computer continues... On the road to Solaris at home
Well I've made some progress at home in getting my new server running.
I've hit some rough patches too. After my experiments with various OS
installs (FC4, Suse, Solaris) I wiped the disks and started from
scratch. At first I had 4 seagate drives on the motherboard controller
and the dvd/cd on the Promise pci controller. Well I guess not
surprisingly that didn't work. While the install dvd boots once it gets
to the secondary boot it fails because Solaris doesn't have drivers for
the Promise controller. So I re-cable so I have 3 disks and the dvd/cd
on the motherboard controller and one drive on the Promise controller.
I've lost one drive but hopefully I will get it back soon enough. As it
is I have plenty of disk space. After that, the install goes fine
though I sure wish that the Solaris install would pick even a halfway
intelligent set of slice sizes when it goes to partition a disk. The
default selection is beyond lame.
Since I'm not running the hardware 1 update release I had to install an open source driver
for the onboard NIC. That worked fine and the new machine "wiz" (after
a late cat of ours) is connected to the rest of the network in the
house. Now to install a bunch of extras. First on the list is Firefox.
I downloaded pkg-get from blastwave
and with one quick command and many megabytes of downloads I had
firefox (and seemingly every other thing on the blastwave site)
installed. This was really kind of cool. It was in a lot of ways better
than my usual experience with RPMs, more like using CPAN.
There is one thing I don't like about this though. When you install
packages via the blastwave site they go into their own directory
structure so even if the package in one that came with Solaris it
doesn't install it in the same location as Solaris would so you end up
with two copies. So for instance now I have two copies of perl
installed. The hitch will be if I upgrade Solaris and end up with a
package or two that are newer than what is in blastwave you're kind of
stuck getting a proper PATH hierarchy making sure you always get the
newest stuff. It's not like this is a problem unique to Solaris though
I had the same issues with my RH system whenever I added new stuff. I
sure wish it didn't work this way though. By the time I was done with
blastwave I got a lot of the stuff I needed to swap out the RH machine
(spamassassin, razor, etc.)
So now the basic machine is set up. I mirrored the two non-root drives using DiskSuite.
This was pretty straightforward. This mirror is intended to be the safe
storage for all the machines in the house. So the next thing to do is
to make the mirror visible to the macs in the house. I had gotten
advice to use Samba for this but this sort of goes against the grain. I
really wanted to use NFS. I realize NFS will mean I have to do some
uid/gid surgery and that since the mac will allow filenames that NFS
won't (and neither does Samba) it won't be a perfect solution. I think
I can live with it though and if not I expect I'll switch to AFS.
I started with my laptop as its user community is more tolerant :-). So I followed the instruction here and here. Just like most things on the web they were almost correct. If I had used NFSManager
like in the second reference it probably would have worked instantly.
That would have been too easy, I used NetInfo by hand. I found that the
information in the first reference "Automounting via NetInfo" (I'm
running 10.3.9) was close. I found that the "dir" property seems to be
completely ignored. OSX seems to use /automount/...
no matter what I did. I also found that the "type" property had to really be "vfstype". Then it worked fine.
Then I had to convert my login on the Powerbook so that the uid/gid
would match everywhere in the house. This was the scariest part of the
work so far. The mac didn;t have a "users" group so I created one in
NetInfo and added myself to it. Then came the scary part I used NetInfo
to change my uid (I left my gid alone since I had already added myself
to users, being in multiple groups shouldn't hurt) while I was logged
out as me and logged in as a different user. Then I had to run a find
command to change the ownership of all my files on the laptop. When
this completed I went to log in. No luck, my short name didn't appear
and the password was rejected (no I didn't use a uid below 500).
I decided that things probably were just out of sync and that I ought
to just reboot. With finger crossed I rebooted, would I be able to log
back in to the laptop? After reboot I could log in fine and everything
appeared normal. Whew! Now I can start migrating data off my laptop and
onto wiz.
Next up what about the missing drivers...
Aug 11 2005, 09:28:12 AM EDT
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