Solaris 10

October 30th, 2006 at 0:02 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Computing, Hacking, Solaris

Pyxis1 was down two months ago. I decided to try to revive it last Friday. At first, I was thinking of installing either FC5 (Fedora Core 5) or Debian. On second thought, I have had enough with Linux. I am running SPARC/Solaris 9 on Pyxis2 (Sun Blade 150). I always wanted to try out Solaris 10 but I don’t want to mess with the existing Solaris 9 on Pyxis2. There is a saying, “Don’t fix thing if it ain’t broken.” and I always reminded myself. Pyxis1 has provided an opportunity to try out Solaris 10. So I started to search for the CDs which I received from Sun Microsystems. I found it but it was quite outdated compare to the 6/06 version on Sun’s server. I immediately began downloading 6 CDs.

The problem with Linux is that every distro has their own way of doing things. This is pretty obvious in configuration and config files. Although all distros are based on the same kernel, yet every distro has different kernel version and variation in configurtion of their kernel and software components. Another dreadful problem is the online updates which break the integrity of Linux and software components. A few weeks after my first successful installation of FC5, I performed an online updates and it instantly broke some working components. Although my FC5 is still working, I have problem with Desktop Login, displaying .png files, and some administration applications stop working as well.

Solaris 10 is an excellent UNIX operating system. It is currently free. The release and Sun’s OpenSolaris has stirred some uproar in the Open Source community and IT industry as a whole. Solaris 10 is a very impressive operating system in terms of some features no other operating system can claim and some are not necessarily new, but have been implemented in an excellent way. But yet it is not perfect. An obvious example is the detection and configuration of hardware, such as NIC and sound card, are not polished.

It is assumed that Solaris will not be installed by novice. The installation need humongous effort and is painful. The graphical installtion is resource hungry. Without the minimum 400MB RAM, the installation resort to console installation. The installation process is not well polished as aforementioned. But I believe, the future Solaris will receive plenty of improvement if Sun is heading to Linux territory. By that time, even the faint hearted novice would be able to install Solaris effortlessly.

Once the installation is completed, the operating system whirs swiftly, making the its old nickname “Slowlaris” not applicable.

Saturday evening I began the installation. After the first installation, I could not get my networking to work. I searched for posts and articles about problems with installing Solaris 10 on x86. I thought it might be some steps which I had overlook. At night, I installed it for second time. It was getting too late and I was tired and I left the installation to go on while I went to bed. I woke up early Sunday morning to finish the installation. Again, I was still having networking problem. After reading some posts, I started my own investigation.

First, I found out that the Solaris installation failed to detect and to configure my NIC. It was an integrated Intel 10/100 on Compaq Evo D510 Small Form Factor PC. I performed an “ifconfig -a” and only showed the loopback.

# ifconfig -a
lo0: flags=2001000849 mtu 8232 index 1
inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000

Next, I needed to determine if my NIC was there. So I did:

# prtconf -pv

It returned some results and I look for “Ethernet controller”:

Node 0x000011
assigned-addresses:  82054010.00000000.f8500000.00000000.0000100
0.81054014.00000000.00001000.00000000.00000040
reg: 00054000.00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000.02054010.0000
0000.00000000.00000000.00001000.01054014.00000000.00000000.000
00000.00000040
compatible: 'pci8086,103b.e11.12.81' + 'pci8086,103b.e11.12' +
' pcie11,12' + 'pci8086,103b.81' + 'pci8086,103b' + 'pciclass,020000' +
'pciclass, 0200'
model:  'Ethernet controller'
power-consumption:  00000001.00000001
fast-back-to-back:
devsel-speed:  00000001
interrupts:  00000001
max-latency:  00000038
min-grant:  00000008
subsystem-vendor-id:  00000e11
subsystem-id:  00000012
unit-address:  '8'
class-code:  00020000
revision-id:  00000081
vendor-id:  00008086
device-id:  0000103b
name:  'pcie11,12'

With this output, I was sure that I had my NIC on Pyxis1. From the identifying handle, “pci8086″, I was certain to use iprb interface for the configuration. These are the steps which I followed:

In /etc/driver_aliases, add
```
iprb "pci8086,103b"
```
Reboot the system with
```
# touch /reconfigure; reboot
```

Setup iprb with

# ifconfig iprb0 plumb
# ifconfig iprb0 inet 195.168.24.4 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast +
# ifconfig iprb0 up

Creeat /etc/hostname.iprb0
```
# echo pyxis1 > /etc/hostname.iprb0
```
In /etc/hosts, add
```
195.168.24.4     pyxis1   pyxis1
```

Create two files in /etc

# echo 195.168.24.1 > /etc/defaultrouter
# echo nameserver DNS_ip_address_1 >> /etc/resolv.conf
# echo nameserver DNS_ip_address_2 >> /etc/resolv.conf