I've had fun playing with my Belkin 54g Wireless Cable/DSL Gateway Router to get my Sun Ray 1G securely connected to Sun. I think that it is slighty misconfigured now. TurboTax was not able to do an autoupdate and they have a lot of web verbage about routers and MTU.

It could just be my laptop, but I'm also locked out of certain sites (blogs.sun.com for example from adept, my Linux box) on some boxes and not others. It doesn't seem specific to hardware/OS, so I'm thinking something is hosed on the router. Oh yeah, I had just done a firmware update. Ouch.

Ironically, the Sun Ray 1G (I've got to give it a name soon) might be one of my best tools to diagnose the problem - all of its routing goes to Sun and not my gear.

So, I decided to see if I could innocently package together my own distro. I even came up with a name - Kanigix.

I'm going to try braindead things in my quest to produce a single-sided DVD image for x86 machines. I'm just warning you ahead of time.

I could track down the process/scripts internally at Sun Microsystems, but that isn't fair and I'm unsure of the legal consequences. I.e., why isn't it already public? It has to be tainted with copyright.

The first braindead thing I tried, i.e., it failed, right? was to copy together the contents of Nevada b35 and the Solaris Software Companion DVD. I did cheat a bit, I took the bits for b35 internally. I didn't get a doorstop, but it didn't work. The genesis of this idea came from the instructions of combining the CD ISOs in order to make the DVD:

For UNIX:
Using the UNIX cat command, copy the files in the correct order, into a single file named:
"sol-10-GA-x86-dvd.iso" for x86, or
"sol-10-GA-sp-dvd.iso" for SPARC:

Note: The correct syntax for the cat command is: "cat file1 file2 ... [ fileN] > file" where file1, file2, fileN are the download images and "file" is the .iso file you are creating.

Okay, this is neat, and public: Creating a Customized Boot CD/DVD for the Solaris Operating System for x86 Platforms.

I even did it correctly:

[tdh@adept SOLDIER]> cat solarisdvd.iso sol-10-u1-companion-ga.iso > kanigix-x86-b35.iso
Time spent in user mode   (CPU seconds) : 0.260s
Time spent in kernel mode (CPU seconds) : 29.305s
Total time                              : 7:41.88s
CPU utilisation (percentage)            : 6.3%

I burned the image correctly, I was able to reinstall wont from it. But I wasn't able to get to the Software Companion stuff.

So, on a stock b35 DVD, I see:

[tdh@adept cdrecorder]> ls -la
total 480
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root   4096 Mar  6 15:24 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root   4096 Mar 14 23:39 ..
dr-xr-xr-x  3 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:24 boot
-r--r--r--  1 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:25 .catalog
-r--r--r--  1 root root     92 Feb 18 01:27 .cdtoc
-r--r--r--  1 root root   6851 Mar  2 17:33 Copyright
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:24 .install
lr-xr-xr-x  1 root root     33 Mar  6 15:23 .install_config -> ./Solaris_11/Misc/.install_config
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root root    257 Mar  6 14:37 installer
-r--r--r--  1 root root 459760 Mar  2 17:33 JDS-THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME
-r--r--r--  1 root root    419 Mar  2 17:33 .slicemapfile
dr-xr-xr-x  8 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:24 Solaris_11
-r--r--r--  1 root root     15 Mar  2 17:33 .volume.inf
-r--r--r--  1 root root     17 Mar  6 14:34 .volume.inf.2
-r--r--r--  1 root root     17 Mar  6 14:36 .volume.inf.3
-r--r--r--  1 root root     17 Mar  6 14:37 .volume.inf.4
[tdh@adept cdrecorder]> cat .cdtoc
#
# @(#) i386.dot.cdtoc 1.6@(#)
#
PRODNAME=Solaris
PRODVERS=11
PRODDIR=Solaris_11/Product
#
[tdh@adept cdrecorder]> cat .volume.inf
VI"SOL_11_X86"

And on my kanigix disk, I see:

[tdh@adept cdrecorder1]> ls -la
total 480
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root   4096 Mar  6 15:24 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root   4096 Mar 14 23:39 ..
dr-xr-xr-x  3 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:24 boot
-r--r--r--  1 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:25 .catalog
-r--r--r--  1 root root     92 Feb 18 01:27 .cdtoc
-r--r--r--  1 root root   6851 Mar  2 17:33 Copyright
dr-xr-xr-x  5 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:24 .install
lr-xr-xr-x  1 root root     33 Mar  6 15:23 .install_config -> ./Solaris_11/Misc/.install_config
-r-xr-xr-x  1 root root    257 Mar  6 14:37 installer
-r--r--r--  1 root root 459760 Mar  2 17:33 JDS-THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME
-r--r--r--  1 root root    419 Mar  2 17:33 .slicemapfile
dr-xr-xr-x  8 root root   2048 Mar  6 15:24 Solaris_11
-r--r--r--  1 root root     15 Mar  2 17:33 .volume.inf
-r--r--r--  1 root root     17 Mar  6 14:34 .volume.inf.2
-r--r--r--  1 root root     17 Mar  6 14:36 .volume.inf.3
-r--r--r--  1 root root     17 Mar  6 14:37 .volume.inf.4
[tdh@adept cdrecorder1]> cat .cdtoc
#
# @(#) i386.dot.cdtoc 1.6@(#)
#
PRODNAME=Solaris
PRODVERS=11
PRODDIR=Solaris_11/Product
#
[tdh@adept cdrecorder1]> cat .volume.inf
VI"SOL_11_X86"

But I can physically eyeball the difference in recorded content on the two media. What does a stock Solaris Software Companion DVD have at the root?

# cd s10_106_software_companion/
# ls -la
total 16
dr-xr-xr-x   2 root     sys         2048 Nov  9 08:54 .
drwxr-xr-x   4 root     nobody       512 Mar 14 23:51 ..
-r--r--r--   1 root     sys           77 Nov  9 08:54 .cdtoc
-rw-r--r--   1 root     sys           31 Nov  9 08:54 .volume.inf
drwxr-xr-x   4 root     sys         2048 Nov  9 08:54 Solaris_sparc
drwxr-xr-x   4 root     sys         2048 Nov  9 08:54 Solaris_x86
# cat .cdtoc
#
PRODNAME=Solaris_Software_Companion
PRODVERS=10
PRODDIR=Solaris_10/Product
# cat .volume.inf
VI"S10_106_SOFTWARE_COMPANION"

Hmm, I don't have any CD ISO images to pull apart right now, but my guess is that they are orthoganol in that the information does not collide. But, in that case, I would have either expected that the Solaris Software Companion's info overwrote the first one or that I would find directory entries for Solaris_sparc and Solaris_x86.

Oh well, more braindead things to follow. :->