Friday Feb 27, 2009

Solaris U6 on Dell Vostro 200

The USB detection is broken with ICH9 Use -B acpi-user-options=0x8 to boot.

Thursday Feb 26, 2009

Sun Ray 4.1 on OpenSolaris 2008.11

This is installation and troubleshoot procedures to install Sun Ray 4.1 on Opensolaris 2008.11 on my latop. Excellent write up on this is available on the following blog entries:

My intent is to use this at home as well as demo VDI at customer presentations. As such, I did not want to load the Sun Ray server in a Virtual Box session which would unnecessarily slow the the applications.

The networking setup is the crucial as I did not disable the NWAM properly and made system config as utadm expects. Troubleshooting the mistakes I made here took many hours. DO THE FOLLOWING.

  • Disable NWAM per Sun Sun Ray Wiki
  • Make sure /etc/hostname.interfacename has name and not the IP address. Otherwise, the DHCP config will not be successful.
  • /etc/nodename and /etc/hosts need to match /etc/hostname.interface. Otherwise, the DHCP config will not be successful.
  • Use utadm -A method and don't take default.
      Accept as is? ([Y]/N): n
      Do you want to offer IP addresses for this subnet? (Y/[N]): y
    
  • If you are staring at 26D on the Sun Ray device, then apply this work around.
    netservices open
    /opt/SUNWut/sbin/utrestart -c
    

Useful debugging commands:

utquery -d xx.xx.xx.xx
dhtadm -P
pntadm -L
pntadm -P

Tuesday Feb 24, 2009

ZFS Delegated Administration

ZFS is one of the coolest features Solaris. In addition to having an unlimited snapshots automatically so that you can go back and recover deleted or modified files , the administration of this power can be delegated to the individual users. For example

# zfs allow rslee create,mount,snapshot rpool/export/home/rslee
$ zfs snapshot rpool/export/home/rslee@beforebigchange

Friday Feb 20, 2009

OpenSolaris 2009.06 107 Install

Tried a copy of OpenSolaris 2009.06 Build 107. For some reason, the graphical installer does not start by itself. The following is couple of steps to get the installer up:

login:jack
password:jack
su opensolaris
PATH=/usr/openwin/bin:$PATH
/usr/bin/dbus-uuidgen [--ensure=/var/lib/dbus/machine-id
gdm

Alternate way:

Work-around: Login as user "jack", password "jack" and then
issue the command

    $ svcadm clear nwam

The boot process should continue and start the graphical
desktop.

Once the system is up and running, use the development package tree as below:

pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.opensolaris.org/dev/ opensolaris.org.dev

Thursday Feb 19, 2009

Google App Engine on OpenSolaris 2008.11

Google App Engine SDK does not list explicitly list Solaris as one of the platforms. Would it work? Unfortunately, the GAE does not seem to work. Defect 1082 was filed with Google.

  • Download Google App Engine SDK (the Linux/Other Platforms version)
  • Unpack the zip file. I put mine under ~bin directory
  • Install Python 2.5 per GAE Requirement. Python 2.4 is standard install on OpenSolaris 2008.11.
    pfexec pkg install SUNWPython25
    

    Follow the Hello World instruction. Unfortunately, dev_appserver.py returns with below:

    SystemError: frexp() result out of range
    ValueError: bad marshal data
    
  • Install Python 2.5 from sunfreeware.com

    This is somewhat complicated as sunfreeware.com does not resolve the dependencies for you. But the following is list of packages downloaded to make Python work with GAE on OpenSolaris work. (not 100%. see below. Don't think PIL will be required for testing for now). Use script to automate the install of all the packages.

    bzip2
    coreutils
    expat
    fontconfig
    freetype
    gcc
    gd
    glib
    gnuplot
    gtk+
    jpeg
    libgcc
    libiconv
    libintl
    libpng
    mhash
    ncurses
    openssl
    pango
    python
    readline
    render
    renderproto
    tiff
    wxgtk
    xrender
    zlib
    

    Finally, the GAE on OpenSolaris...

    rslee@x61:~/bin/google_appengine$ ./dev_appserver.py ~/src/helloworld/
    INFO     2009-02-22 02:09:41,730 appengine_rpc.py] Server: appengine.google.com
    INFO     2009-02-22 02:09:41,743 appcfg.py] Checking for updates to the SDK.
    INFO     2009-02-22 02:09:44,750 appcfg.py] Update check failed: 
    WARNING  2009-02-22 02:09:44,751 datastore_file_stub.py] Could not read datastore data from /tmp/dev_appserver.datastore
    WARNING  2009-02-22 02:09:44,751 datastore_file_stub.py] Could not read datastore data from /tmp/dev_appserver.datastore.history
    WARNING  2009-02-22 02:09:44,774 dev_appserver.py] Could not initialize images API; you are likely missing the Python "PIL" module. ImportError: No module named _imaging
    INFO     2009-02-22 02:09:44,794 dev_appserver_main.py] Running application helloworld on port 8080: http://localhost:8080
    

Wednesday Feb 18, 2009

Lenovo x61 and OpenSolaris 2008.11

The following is list of things to make my laptop fully function with OpenSolaris 2008.11 so that I can finally remove Windows, for obvious reasons. I still need to maintain Windows within VirtualBox, which by the way boots up Windows faster than on native machine.

Additional Device Drivers/Software

Out of Box Functionality

The following items works without needing any tweaking:

  • Display brightness adjustment using the FN key
  • Keyboard LED light control using the FN key

Some tweaking required

  • To send display to external VGA screen
    xrandr --output VGA --auto
    

Booting OpenSolaris off USB Stick

Booting/Installing OpenSolaris 2008.11 from USB stick is described here Works very well. I followed just the first 3 steps.

wget http://genunix.org/distributions/indiana/osol-0811.usb 
pkg install SUNWdistro-const
usbcopy osol-0811.usb

If a prebuilt USB is not available, an ISO image can be converted to USB manually. This blog has instructions. The following is my example to convert Sun's xVM Server EA3 into USB stick

pfexec pkg install SUNWdistro-const
pfexec usbgen `pwd`/xVM-Server-full-i14_03.iso `pwd`/xVM-Server-full-i14_03.usb /tmp
pfexec usbcopy xVM-Server-full-i14_03.gen
Found the following USB devices:
0:	/dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0	4.0 GB	USB      Flash Disk       5.00
1:	/dev/rdsk/c5t0d0p0	 HL-DT-ST	DVDRAM GSA-E50L  NE01
Enter the number of your choice: 0

WARNING: All data on your USB storage will be lost.
Are you sure you want to install to
USB Flash Disk 5.00, 4000 MB at /dev/rdsk/c3t0d0p0 ?  (y/n) y

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