You can also use it to automatically configure a static IP address upon boot too.

Simply edit the file /etc/nwam/llp to your desired settings. For example:

e1000g0   static   192.168.0.45/24

Easy!

The /24 part of that string represents the netmask. in this case, it would be expressed as 255.255.255.0 in decimal notation.

Then create /etc/defaultrouter so that your machine can reach the outside world! For example…

192.168.0.1

…as this is the address of the router on my LAN
Finally, create the /etc/resolv.conf file, so that the OS knows where to look to resolve DNS names!

On my LAN , this would be:

nameserver   192.168.0.1

If your still having trouble resolving host names, you may need to check that the /etc/nsswitch.conf file reflects the fact that you want to look in both files and the DNS to resolve host names. The hosts and ipnodes entries should look like this:

hosts:        files dns
ipnodes:      files dns

Once all that is done you can simply restart the NWAM service:

pfexec svcadm restart nwam

anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
/usr/share/man/windex: No such file or directory

To get round this, we simply go ahead and create the index with catman:

anton@opensolaris:/$ pfexec time catman -w

real        2.9
user        1.8
sys         0.1

Its pretty quick, and you get left with a little index in /usr/share/man/windex. Its just an ascii version of all the names of your manpages, plus a one line summary of what each one does:

1        1 (3openssl)    - OpenSSL configuration functions
1        1 (3openssl)    - OpenSSL configuration functions
1394        ieee1394 (7d)    - Solaris IEEE-1394 Architecture
2        2 (3openssl)    - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2        2 (3openssl)    - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2        2 (3openssl)    - \& OpenSSL configuration cleanup functions
2.1        EasyTAG (1)    - Tag editor for MP3 and Ogg Vorbis files
2_F32_Sat    mlib_SignalConvertShift_U8_S8_Sat (3mlib)   – data type convert
with shifting
5.0        MySQL (1)    - MySQL RDBMS version 5.0 for Solaris
6to4        tun (7m)    - tunneling STREAMS module
6to4relay    6to4relay (1m)    - administer configuration for 6to4 relay router
communication
6to4tun     tun (7m)    - tunneling STREAMS module
7-Zip        7-Zip (1)    - A file archiver with highest compression ratio

So now when you do your man -k , you’ll get something useful!:

anton@opensolaris:/$ man -k grub
bootadm     bootadm (1m)    - manage bootability of GRUB-enabled operating system
grub        grub (5)    - GRand Unified Bootloader software on Solaris
installgrub    installgrub (1m)    – install GRUB in a disk partition or a floppy

Crucially you only want to do catman -w , otherwise you’ll be reformatting all your manpages!

From the man page of catman:

-w                  Only create the windex database that  is
used  by whatis(1) and the man(1) -f and
-k options.  No manual  reformatting  is
done.

This includes the following changes:

6368478 Solaris needs to support the Rock processor
6440653 stores to sun4v error queue head registers are missing a membar #Sync
6639717 FLUSH instruction used more than necessary in sun4v

Maybe once this is done, a proper attempt at getting dtrace across might happen. After all, something like dtrace is highly desirable on any operating system.

you want netbeans?

pkg install netbeans

Theres also a graphical installer too! Theres a screencast you might want to watch which explains a little about how to use it, and what its about!

You should also note that its made it onto distrowatch.com, to rank 69!!!!Hopefully enough people will blog about the release to push that figure up!!!Surely it should make it to the top ten, for all the features it has?

The interesting bit comes with file permissions and Windows file attributes which aren’t quite the same, in fact, not at all. The attributes get mapped onto the unix file permissions in an interesting way, and you’ll need to keep that in mind when ls -l ing around a shared directory.

Meanwhile, there was a directory named “—-FILES—-” on the share. Trying to use

cd "----FILES----"

doesn’t quite work! Despite quoting the directory name, cd still tries to take some of those dashes as a switch. I’m not sure if theres a way around this using the relative path, but there is a different workaround: simply use the absolute path, instead of a relative one to get you there, eg:

cd /mydir/----FILES..../

To make a directory with leading dashes, you’ll need to specify the full pathname, or use something like this to make the process less painful:

mkdir `pwd`/--mydir--

Well, Sun has just announced that their Service Tag technology has just been open sourced. They fit in as a part to their Sun Connection infrastructure management platform. Basically, the service tags are the little bits of software used to identify you hardware and report it back to you. This can be implemented for hardware and software, and should mean that ISVs and all hardware vendors can make their products that little bit easier to manage! To quote the site:

Open Service Tag is the reference implementation of a standards initiative that will seek the involvement of OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturer) and ISVs (Independent Software Vendor) to define a standard definition for product identification and discovery.

This is very good news for System Administrators! I can speak from experience that its not nice having to open up hundreds of machines looking for a particular piece of hardware, because there isn’t a command to find it. I truly hope that Sun go through all their back catalog of hardware to make sure absolutely everything is possible to find! This should also include bits of hardware that carry other interesting things built in, like motherboard network interfaces.

Its also quite entertaining that if a Sun product isn’t called a “Sun Java Web enabled, scalable ..” something or other, it still has important sounding features like “Sun Update Satellite Console”.

Its also surprising that Sun has been working on this since May 2007 and I’ve missed it till now! A high level overview of how this might help you manage your enterprise can be found here.

We make the files (we can use files instead of real disks…):

anton@solaris-devx ~ $ mkfile 100M /tmp/file1
anton@solaris-devx ~ $ mkfile 100M /tmp/file2
and then su to root to make the ZFS file system (mirrored):

# zpool create crazedPool mirror /tmp/file1 /tmp/file2

I should note that for some reason ZFS didn’t make use of the entire file size:

# zfs list crazedPool
NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT
crazedPool 110K 63.4M 20K /crazedPool

And now the real test. How about a big file? Lets say, 100G?:

anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ time mkfile 100G woot
real 1m21.995s
user 0m0.191s
sys 0m30.308s
And what about 10000 files, each 10M in size?:
anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ i="0"
anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ time while [ $i -lt 10000 ]
> do
> mkfile 10M la0$i
> i=$[$i+1]
> done
real 1m46.789s
user 0m4.665s
sys 0m43.492s

So far, so good. So now lets push the envelope off the desk. Or maybe off a cliff. Lets see what happens when we make a 100TB file with ZFS!

anton@solaris-devx dir1 $ ls -l megaFile
-rw------- 1 anton staff 107374182400000 Mar 15 18:05 megaFile

and the compression ratio?:

anton@solaris-devx tmp $ zfs get compressratio crazedPool
NAME PROPERTY VALUE SOURCE
crazedPool compressratio 1.00x -

hmm, not quite what I was expecting!