unixwiz

I began setting up my new sun server and san at home the other day.. (Picked up a Sun V20Z and a Sun T3 SAN Disk array very cheap)… Because I am going to be doing some IPv6 testing as well, I installed a Sun Gigaswift (aka Sun’s ce, Cassini Ethernet) card in to the machine along with the fibre channel card. I put the VMWare vSphere 4i cd in and went on with the install. But didn’t really pay attention that it did not see the CE card, just the two broadcom cards.. So I went ahead any ways thinking I will fix it later. But it seems that there is no drivers on the interweb for the Sun CE card for vmware? If any one knows of a place to get them let me know? Otherwise I will have to find a new card to use in it’s place.

Sun, VMWare Cassini, Ethernet, Sun, V20Z, VMWare

Not sure how I feel now that Sun is no longer Sun. Kinda weird watching the Oracle web cast of their purchase of Sun and what is going to happen. One thing I can’t understand is they are all wearing badges saying “We’re Hiring!”. But yet they let go SO many good Sun employees. I just don’t think it is going to be the same old Sun that I have used since 1994.

RIP Sun 1982 – 2010

From http://blogs.sun.com/jag/

Random Stuff, Solaris, Sun Oracle, RIP, Sun

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

3. Comment out the following line:

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.

Once done, do the following:

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”:

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:

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:

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 :

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

Apple, MacOSX, Solaris, Sun, Sun Ray, Sun Ray @Home Fusion, MacOS, MacPro, Solaris, Sun Ray, Sun Ray 5 Early Access, Sun Ray @Home, VMWare

Because of the storms a couple of weeks ago, the harddrives in my one solaris box had failed. I bought a couple of new 500gb harddrives to replace the 80 that was in it. So I downloaded the newest update of Solaris 10 (update 7) and did the install. Everything worked perfect, then it rebooted. All I got was the “grub>” prompt. Nothing would let me boot it. I booted back off of the cdrom and updated the boot-archive, everything seemed fine, but it still would not boot off of the harddrive. So I tried to do it by hand at the grub> prompt:

Great.. now what. It appears that you have to have the boot info in the first 1023 cylinders of the harddrive. Well this big 500GB harddrive has over 60,000+ cylinders on it. Guess what, the Solaris installer put the swap on 3-263 and then put the root on 58884 – some high number.. So obviously grub is going to have a problem.

So how do you fix this. There is 2 possible ways that I can think of and possibly a third.

The first would be for Sun to change the installer to not automatically place root at the end of the disk.

The second is when you are getting ready to do the install, pre-layout the disks using format from the command line.

The third is what I am trying, since the remaining of the disk has not been used yet, I am going to move the partitions around with dd. The first thing I did was delete the swap partition on slice 1. The second was to create a new temp partition on slice 3 that is the exact same size as slice 0. Now using dd I did the following:

Hopefully this won’t take too long as the partition is only 15gb in size. You could have done the same thing with tar and have both partitions mounted. Once the dd finishes. I will delete the slice 0 and recreate it starting at cylinder 3 and give it the same size as it was before, and then dd the info back. Once that is done, delete the temp slice and recreate a swap partition. Hopefully this works.

Solaris, Sun big disk, format, install, Solaris

Justin pointed out to me tonight that the new Recommended and Security patch clusters for Solaris 10 were quite large. And right he was.. It seems that in the last month or so the 10 Recommended patch cluster has grown from 400meg to over 1GB in size now. (not to mention that he said you need almost 2.5 gig of space to unzip it.)

Looking at the cluster readme, I can take a guess as to why it is so large, there are multiple kernel patches. There are also updates to Firefox, Thunderbird, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash plugin, multiple Java Updates and a patch for the defunct Mozilla 1.7 browser (which in my opinion should just be removed completely).

The interesting part is that the X86 patch cluster is over 300Meg smaller than the sparc one. The only major difference that I can think of is that X86 doesn’t have Adobe Acrobat Reader yet.

I wish Sun would just offer a ISO download of all the patches now (sort of like the EIS dvd) for the public.  Also need to find a faster way to download the patches.

Security, Solaris, Sun Security, Solaris, Sun