Travels with FatCatAir

Thursday August 11, 2005

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 Permalink