ML Starkey's Weblog: Service with a smile!
Providing Technical Support to Sun's customers and other topics

I had an "everything is a project" moment the other day trying to get OpenSolaris 2008.11 running under VirtualBox 1.6.2. OpenSolaris 2008.05 ran fine for me, as well as for others.

But there is something different about the 2008.11 release. It won't boot either as a VirtualBox Guest OR a Live CD. Errors are different for each, but end result is the same: OS won't start. From what info I can find, it seems to be related to my Toshiba laptop hardware. (I don't have the discussion links handy). I edited the kernel line with -kvd and got verbose output from the Live CD boot, but it didn't mean anything to me.

Instead I'll create an OpenSolaris guest on the 2.1.0 release. It's all installed, so let 'er rip.

1. Start VirtualBox 2.1.0. Hello, what's this:

I always like to see whatever additional info the developers give so I select "more":

"Backup" is always a good choice

OK! I'm at the main screen and my two OpenSolaris guest OS':

trying to start 2008.11 now:

Here's a warning coming from Windows Firewall that I didn't see before. I selected "unblock". Now the dots are running across the screen and I wait:

selecting USA and English and let's see what happens . . . . . . it's not looking good:

these seem to be the same errors as before. I google around on a disk error I found in the logs (and the previous logs as well) "int13_harddisk: function 02, parameters out of range 0000/0000/0001!". Just for kicks, I tried enabling the SATA virtual controller but that didn't help either.

Let's see if there is any difference if I use an ISO image from the laptop hard drive instead of the CD-ROM (although this works fine with 2008.05).

Changing the ISO path:

and start the VM ... . success!!

But it's really slow. Hard to move the mouse around. Reboot to the text console. What I want to test next is NAT. Who can the VM ping and who can ping the VM?

Quick breakdown of testing after listing the ip addresses and default gateways of the VM, other hosts on the LAN and the netgear router:

can the VM (ip 10.0.2.15) ping other hosts attached to my Netgear router? YES
can another host (ip 192.168.1.4) attached to the netgear router ping the VM? NO
can that same ip address ping the VM's defaultrouter (10.0.2.2)? NO
can the VM ping the IP address provided to the Netgear router by comcast? YES
can the VM ping the gateway address provided to the Netgear router by comcast? YES

That's about all I have time for today. Next up: Create a Solaris 10 10/08 DVD and repeat the ping tests. Create a few Windows VMs to see how that works.