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31 January 2007

Testing OpenSolaris

So I decided to try OpenSolaris on our old server (old being a year or so). It won't be the long term solution, because I want AMD-V for Xen... but here's my observations so far.

  1. Installation was easy, but first time, it did not make the system bootable. I had to format all the drives to get it to quit presenting FreeBSD as a boot option as well.
  2. The first install, it tried to use c2d0, but the second install it used c4d0. Shouldn't this be consistently the same boot device?
  3. Even though the router has the NIC set to a specific IP, it defaulted to a different MAC address and thus a different IP. I can only assume that it is a virtual NIC.
  4. When I switch back and forth on the Belkin KVM, the mouse freaks out in Solaris -- even though it works in Linux and FreeBSD.
  5. When activating the remote desktop, via GNOME, it sets it to localhost and doesn't allow me to change it to use the server name or IP -- thus, can't avoid #4 that way. Might have to go in and edit the files by hand, but unlike Linux/FreeBSD, I am not too familiar with Solaris yet.
  6. When I went to do the Update via the GUI, it asked for my Sun account info (which I provided) then just said there was an error. Guess that won't fix #4 or #5.
  7. ZPOOL seemed to work fine -- but creating iSCSI, SMB and NFS targets (via CLI or GUI) only seems to work at the server end. No one else on the network can access it.
  8. Contrary to what most people have said, the GUI doesn't look so bad.
  9. I enabled Telnet in services, and that didn't seem to work either.
More later

8 comments:

  1. Ok, so I had set the IP as static. I went in and changed it to DHCP, at which point it reacquired the same IP, subnetmask, gateway, etc.

    And now it shows up in Windows network neighborhood.

    Of course, when I try to browse it, it asks for a password and neither user account works -- but it is still progress.

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  2. Hmm, well the router is showing multiple new NICs on the network. Wonder if it is giving us a virtual nic per user? That would be odd.

    Well, I set it to static again. We'll see if that makes a difference... But, who knows which MAC address is correct ('ifconfig' doesn't work) -- if the router has the wrong one...

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  3. Here is some info... evidentally, as of b50, it defaults to not allowing network stuff...

    http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/on/flag-days/pages/2006060101/

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  4. ok, using the GUI we can get the name of the interface (in this case nge0) and then via 'ifconfig nge0' we can see the MAC address.

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  5. For some reason, the NetGear is not allowing us to specify anything for that interface. Specifically, it won't let me change the type to "Server" or set the IP as anything other than Automatic(DHCP). WTF?

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  6. They had the same mouse problem with the KVM and fixed it for KDE.

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  7. submitted a bug about the mouse... don't see it in the database yet

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