Month: July 2009

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Sun Ray 5 Early Access part 2

I finally got time again to start playing with Sun Ray 5 Early Access software. Now my current setup probably should not be used for any type of test more than simple single/dual user testing. But I did not want to test the software on the current working server. So I decided to install it in a VMWare image on my Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is more than suited to handle it and had plenty of free memory/processor/storage to use so there was no contention (I gave the VM 4 processors and 8 gig of ram)..

The kicker was getting VMWare Fusion to actually allocate the network cards the way I needed them. I gave the VM 2 nics (the Mac Pro has 2), however the only options that VMWare Fusion let you do is NAT, Host-Only, and Bridged. None of which will work if I want a private network for the Sun Ray’s. To fix this you will need to go and edit some files that VMWare Fusion uses. What I had to do was the following:

1. Open up the Terminal app
2. Edit the file /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh 

sudo vi /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh

3. Comment out the following line:

"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 ''

And then add 2 lines directly below that line, which tells vmware to bind the en0 physical device to the vmnet0 virtual device, same for en1 to vmnet2. Note you can not use vmnet1 or vmnet8 as those are for NAT and Host-only connections.

"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 en0
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet2.pid vmnet2 en1

Once done, do the following:

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart

Now go in to your Mac System Preferences and configure the second network card for a private subnet (i.e. 192.168.128.0/24, and set the IP to be something like 192.168.128.254).

Now make sure that your VM is NOT started and is in a powered off state. Go in to the VM and under the settings for that VM add another network adapter, make sure it is selected as “Connected” it doesn’t matter what the device is configured to as we will change it later to an option that is not shown in that list.

Now you need to change the .VMX file so that it can use the new network device. So go in to the directory where you have your VM’s at and then cd in to the machine.vmwarevm directory (For example mine is called SolarisDev.vmwarevm)

Once in there you will need to edit the vmx file, mine is called SolarisDev.vmx. The first thing we are going to change is the ethernet0.connectionType property. Right now it could be any of the ones listed (host-only,bridged, nat). But we are going to change this to “custom”:

ethernet0.connectionType="custom"

Next find the entry for ethernet0.vnet, if it doesn’t exist create it and make it look like the line below. If it does exist and doesn’t match that below, make it match that:

ethernet0.vnet = "vmnet0"

Now we need to do the same for the ethernet1 entries. The only difference to what is above is vmnet0 changes to vmnet2. Once the changes are made you can save the file and start up your Solaris VM. Now what ever network is on your en0 connection on your Mac should be what is connected to the e1000g0 network on the Solaris side. I used the e1000g0 as the “public” side of the Sun Ray server. The e1000g1 interface will be what ever is connected on the en1 connection on the Mac side. I used this adapter for the private Sun Ray Lan.

You should be able to finish following the instructions on the Sun Ray wiki now and get everything configured.

To test the soft client, I set up LAN Connections on the Sun Ray Server:

/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -L on

I then installed the soft client in another VM on the same machine that only had access to the public network. You then can tell the soft client what the IP of the Sun Ray server is and it will connect. Pretty darn cool that the soft client works with minimal config.

This can probably be done on a MacBook Pro as well, if you use the wireless connection as the public side and the wired as the private side. Nice way to do a little demo in one computer.

For reference here is what my network section of the .vmx file looks like :

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.connectionType = "custom"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:f8:29:3b"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"
ethernet0.linkStatePropagation.enable = "TRUE"
ethernet0.pciSlotNumber = "32"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.vnet = "vmnet0"
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"
ethernet1.addressType = "generated"
ethernet1.connectionType = "custom"
ethernet1.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:f8:29:45"
ethernet1.generatedAddressOffset = "10"
ethernet1.linkStatePropagation.enable = "TRUE"
ethernet1.pciSlotNumber = "35"
ethernet1.present = "TRUE"
ethernet1.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet1.vnet = "vmnet2"
ethernet1.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"

References:
Sun Ray Software 4.2 Wiki: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SRSS4dot2/Home

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Good news for DTV in Morgantown

It seems that the TV stations are finally realizing that their Digital Signal doesn’t cover what their analog signal used to.. The hopefully good news for those in Morgantown, WV is that KDKA is filing a petition to build a translator tower in Morgantown so we will be able to get channel 2 over the Air. They are planning on trying to put it on channel 31. The other good news is WPXI is filing a petition to build a translator tower in Uniontown PA what would be on channel 23.

Now if only WTAE, WPGH, WPMY and WPCW would put translators down close to Morgantown, we could finally get good service over the air.

Right now Morgantown, WV is considered in the Pittsburgh DMA, even though we are closer to the Clarksburg DMA. But right now you can’t receive hardly anything from either DMA’s and the only thing we are left with is WNPB which is PBS. So come on WPGH, WTAE, WPMY, and WPCW put some translators in Morgantown so we can get the coverage we used to have with your analog channels!

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Sun Ray Software 5 Early Access

Started installing the Sun Ray 5 Early Access software tonight. Some things I found so far that weren’t where I thought they should have been in the wiki docs:

1. It requires that you have Java 1.6 on the machine. Solaris 10 Update 7 does not come with Java 1.6, so I had to download and install it.

2. It needed apache tomcat installed, this is for the admin gui.

Unfortunately I only got as far as getting it installed. I was testing it in a Solaris VM machine on my Mac, however I was having problems getting it to bind to the second ethernet interface. So that will be for later.

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fscking a disk under solaris volume manager control

Some people may have noticed others may not, but the server went down for a while today. Well the root cause I think is that there were some file system problems. The one thing that lead me to that is this error in /var/adm/messages:

ufs: [ID 879645 kern.notice] NOTICE: /: unexpected free inode 48714, run fsck(1M) -o f

Well this is a little hard to fix especially if you have root under solaris volume manager control. So how do you do it? Sort of easy, but it assumes you have either a solaris boot cd or a jumpstart server you can boot off of to get the box into single user mode.

Once you have the box in single user mode off of either the CD or the jumpstart server, you will need to mount in readonly mode one side of the root mirror. Say /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0. :

mount -o ro /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0 /mnt

Once that is mounted (if it won’t mount then you will have to fsck that side of the mirror to fix the file system if it is really screwed up to not even mount in read only mode) you need to copy some files from it to the “temp” root that you are booted from. But first we need to unload the md driver: 

# modinfo | grep md
 25 fffffffffbb04b88  30608  85   1  md (Solaris Volume Manager base mod)
#modunload -i 25

Now that the md driver is unloaded, you need to copy the following files:

cp /mnt/etc/lvm/mddb.cf  /etc/lvm/mddb.cf 
cp /mnt/etc/lvm/md.cf  /etc/lvm/md.cf
cp /mnt/kernel/drv/md.cf /kernel/drv/md.cf

Now unmount the /mnt 

umount /mnt

Now we need to restart the md driver

modload /kernel/drv/md

Now if you run metastat or metadb, you will get a generic error like there is no devices or databases set up. To fix this run a :

metainit -r

This does the following:

    -r              Only used in a shell script  at  boot  time.
                     Sets up all metadevices that were configured
                     before the system crashed or was shut  down.
                     The  information about previously configured
                     metadevices  is  stored  in  the  metadevice
                     state database (see metadb(1M)).

You can now run metastat, but all your devices will say they need maintenance. To fix this run :

metasync -r

This will sync all the mirrors back up. Now we are finally able to run an fsck againest a mirrored slice that we weren’t able to run if the machine is up in full user mode.

So now I ran :

fsck -o f /dev/md/rdsk/d30

And I keep running fsck on the device till it comes back clean with no errors. Then lather, rinse, repeat for the other slices.

Now once all the slices are done, make sure to update your boot archive (if on an x86 machine) and then you can restart the machine:

mount /dev/md/dsk/d30 /mnt
bootadm update-archive -R /mnt
umount /mnt
shutdown -g0 -i6 -y

If on a SPARC box, just make sure all the file systems you mounted off of the disks are unmounted and then restart the machine.