Doomshammer's Weblog

For one of my customers, I need to copy big data files from an external USB drive to a Solaris 10 server. Problem is, as the files are bigger than 4GiB, the FS on the hard disk of the USB drive needed to be NTFS formated (the customer uses Windows). So I searched for a solution to read NTFS file systems with a Solaris 10 box.

I found the FSWfsmisc package from the BeleniX project. It holds some tools to access ext2, ext3 as well as ntfs partitions. Simply download the package from this location, extract it and install it via pkgadd.

Now one can do a:

and my NTFS partition has been mounted to /mnt. Awesome! Copy speed via USB 2.0 to ZFS is really fast as well (18 to 25MB/Sek. As the partition seems to be mounted like a NFS share, one can't really access much informations from "mount" or "df". Therefor the package ships "xlsmounts" which shows detailed informations about the mounted drive.

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Today I played around with BrandZ. BrandZ makes it possible to install another brand of OS inside of a Solaris Zone. My target was a CentOS installation inside of my zone.

The configuration of the zone works pretty much straight forward. A simple:

is enough, to have a basic linux-branded zone. To make the zone avail. via network, you could add a quick:

to get a network interface assigned to the zone.

Now the zone is ready for installation. To make things easy, I took the CentOS tarbar that is avail. here. The installation is done by this command:


After some minutes (depending on your machine speed and the typ of installation you've choosen) the installtion is complete and you are ready to boot up your linux zone:


Now enter the linux via SSH or local console (zlogin -C) and there we are:


A linux installation couldn't be easier

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As I am still running a very old version of Solaris 10 on one of my boxes, I wanted to verify if an upgrade to one of the current builds works w/o issues. So I downloaded Solaris Nevada build 64 and burned on DVD.

As expected the installer directly noticed that there is already Solaris installed on my disk, so it asked if I wanna upgrade. I selected "Upgrade" and the installer started working. It took about 2.5 hours, but no problem occured. The system rebooted and finally snv b64 started booting. I was very surprised that even the RAID-1 on the two root disks was still intact and that the system bootet from it - awesome

After logging in, I noticed that the zpool (where my home directory lifes) was broken. All drives were unavailable and so I wasn't able to take it online again - probably as the ZFS pool was legacy version 3 and the current version of b64 is v6. Anyhow, as ZFS is pretty smart it was very easy to recover it...



I booted into single user mode (-m milestone=single) and removed the ZFS cache file (/etc/zfs/zfs.cache). Then I continued the boot sequence by running svcadm milestone all, to get into the multi-user milestone. A 'zpool status' confirmed that there was no zpool available anymore. Now I simply executed 'zpool import pool1' and my pool was online and healthy again - followed by 'zpool upgrade pool1' my pool was upgraded to v6 and that's it!



Love it! Now i'm safe to upgrade my old system, as my test-system upgrade worked better than expected

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Some days ago I downloaded the latest Solaris Express Community Release (build 70) as I wanted to try out booting from a ZFS root. But after the installation was done, I ran into some troubles.

The installer automatically rebooted after the installation was done, GRUB came up as expected, but when I selected the corresponding SXCR b70 kernel, I ended up in an error I haven't seen before.



I asked in #opensolaris on Freenode, but nobody was able to provide help. So I tried figuring out what's wrong. I checked bootenv.rc if bootpath was set correctly, I added root(hd0,0,a) to the menu.lst of GRUB, reinstalled GRUB and mboot to the MBR but all I did, didn't help. Finally after re-reading the error message several times, I finally noticed the "reading beyond end of ramdisk". Sounded somehow odd to me - why should the bootload read beyond the ramdisk?

So I booted into failsafe again, mounted c1t0d0s0 to /a and started rebuilding the ramdisk:

Followed by init 6 which directly updated boot_archive (which is good, as this means that the system noticed, that the ramdisk with the boot image has changed).

Indeed the rebuild of the ramdisk helped, as - after the box has been rebooted - the system came up as expected.

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As one never completes training on Solaris (and OpenSolaris), I upgraded my bookshelf with the following three books to get some deeper insight into some new techniques:

#1: OpenSolaris fuer Anwender, Administratoren und Rechenzentren
#2: Veritas Storage Foundation
#3: Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques




I think I have enough input for the next month now Maybe I'll write a review here as well.

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Today two new "toys" arrived

1.) Canon RC-5 IR remote control - works great
2.) OpenSolaris Startkit

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