Getting together a pNFS storage community We decided to get some Mac Minis as test machines for pNFS. We needed small and quiet machines.
The first problem was that the minis do not have a serial port for a console. I bought an IOGear kvm that supported
4 machines - right now I have 3. It fits right in the mini stack. The front view:
And the side view:
I know I can install Nevada 79 (the pNFS codebase is currently ontop of 79) on them - Trebor has done it - but he won't blog about it. So off I go. The first issue is that in boot up, the USB keyboard is not seen, so I have to take the default install of the developer edition. Note that I like a finer grained install which allows you to setup multiple slices. In fact, I will need that for the DS machines - they need ZFS.
Anyway, onward. Note that there are some resources for doing this with bootcamp. I want the whole disk, so I'm trying to treat this like any other x86 box.
The next hurdle is when partitioning it craps out right away with a warning that the '/' slice extends beyond HBA cylinder 1023. The nice thing about the installer is that I do not have to reboot right here. Hmm, trying a 32G root partition does the same thing. I wonder if I'm hitting the bug Paul reports in How to Dual Partition a MacBook Pro with MacOS and Solaris, e.g., CR6413235?
Nope, I bet it is the EFI issue. Okay, I asked Trebor (dark side of Robert Gordon ) if he hit this and the answer was yes. His suggestion was to let the install work until it failed, and then in the resulting terminal do fdisk -E blah, where blah for me was either 'c1d1' or 'c1d1p0'. Both gave the same output for me.
I still selected a 40G partition because I want to have a ZFS partition on the rest of the disk. And now the installation is just proceeding. And it dies trying to install the boot blocks. This was after installing everything.
I'm trying Ubuntu right now to get a different perspective. It also had an issue with the keyboard at first. Note that I can reconfigure the nevada ISO to boot grub up into the regular install if needed.
Anyway, the Ubuntu install is chugging away. It is done and appears to start to reboot. Very slow compared to OS X. And it is networked!
Now I want to see what happens when I install Nevada (snv 79) on top of Ubuntu. The first difference is that I do not get that annoying '/' 1023 cylinder message. Umm! And that works!
Okay, I want to avoid the booting Ubuntu step in the future. I'm pretty sure the problems I am seeing are with the disk label. I guess I really need to pay attention to steps 6-9 of Alan Perry's Setting up a Mac Mini for dual booting Solaris and MacOS X - note that neither Alan or Paul had problems with their keyboards. Paul wouldn't on a laptop. And Alan may have been doing this before the Developer installation was an option.
To get networking going, you need a Marvell Yuokon driver, which you can get from this entry: Solaris 10 U3 on Gateway MX6453 - be sure to follow the advice to get the 64 bit version. And note, it downloaded as skgesol_x64v8.19.1.3.tar.Z.tar for me, so rename it to get rid of the trailing '.tar'.
Read that blog entry again, I needed to add to my '/etc/driver_aliases':
skge "pci11ab,4362"
Okay, I'll continue this later...
